Happy 25th Birthday, Ig Nobel!

Run by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, Ig Nobel is a jubilantly irreverent affair. It has become world famous for recognizing scientific achievements that “make people laugh, and then think”.

This year Ig turns 25. Since 1991, scientists have won for such various feats as levitating a live frog with magnets, teaching pigeons to discern between Monet and Picasso, studying the effect of country music on suicides and experimenting with Coca Cola as a spermicide.

This year’s Ig winners traveled from six continents to accept their trophies.

PHYSICS: Discovering that almost all mammals empty their bladders in somewhere between 8 and 44 seconds.

A group of physicists from the US and Taiwan won for finding “the law of urination”: the principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds), whether they’re the size of an elephant or a shrew.

Researcher David Hu said explaining that gravity was the great equalizer: “the taller the pipe, the faster the pee”.  Link to video. Winners Patricia Yang, David Hu and Jonathan Pham, Jerome Choo recently amended their result: only those mammals whose weight exceeds 3 kg fall under its scope.

DIAGNOSTIC MEDICINE: Discovering that acute appendicitis can be identified by driving a patient over speed bumps.

The idea started as a running joke among surgeons, but Helen Ashdown decided to test it out while working as a junior doctor at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury. In a formal study of 101 patients, 33 of 34 people who were diagnosed with appendicitis reported pain travelling over speed bumps.

MATHEMATICS: Trying to figure out whether it was possible for a 17th and 18th century Moroccan emperor to father 888 children.

The copulative prowess of a 17th-century Moroccan emperor was the subject of a study by German and Austrian mathematicians who won a prize.

Intrigued by the story of Moulay Ismail, born in 1672 and dead at the age of 55, Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer sought to learn whether it would be physically possible for a man to sire between 600 and 888 sons as the fable alleges.

“It’s a lot of work it turns out,” Oberzucher said. “Moulay had to have had sex once or twice a day, which you might actually regard as a low number, but if you think this is every day, every single day for an entire life, this is quite a lot.”

Moulay Ismael, who was also apparently known as Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, was Emperor of Morocco from 1672 to 1727, and is reputed to have fathered almost 900 children during his reign.

BIOLOGY: Noting that chickens walk like dinosaurs probably did, when you attach weighted sticks to their tails.

“We cannot test it in a real T. rex or any theropod dinosaurs – but we can in a chicken,” Dr Vasquez told the BBC. “[The gait] is a little bit crouching and the steps are a bit longer, because the centre of gravity of the animal is changed… and they have to counterbalance the weight of the tail by stretching their neck a little bit.”

MEDICINE: Hajime Kimata (Kimata Hajime Clinic, Japan) and  Jaroslava Durdiaková (Comenius University, Slovakia) and her collagues awarded the prize for experiments to study the biomedical benefits or biomedical consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities).

MANAGEMENT: Discovering that early experience with natural disasters can cause a lifelong fondness for risk-taking.

Gennaro Bernile (Singapore Management University) and colleagues, discovered that many business leaders developed a fondness for risk-taking because they experienced natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and wildfires) in their childhood, disasters that had no dire consequences for them.

ECONOMICS: Paying Bangkok Metropolitan Police officers bonuses if they refuse to take bribes.

PHYSIOLOGY AND ENTOMOLOGY: Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt (Southwest Biological Institute, US) for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith (Cornell University, US), for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm). and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft).

Well, that’s a commendable dedication to science that should undoubtedly put Michael L. Smith into the ranks of scientists who risked their health and life in the name of science. An obscure Australian physician named Barry Marshall, for instance, drank bacteria-laden broth to discover the true cause of peptic (stomach) ulcers — a corkscrew-shaped bacterium known as Helicobacter pylori and point out the cure was a course of antibiotics. For his daring experiment he won a Nobel Prize in 2005.

CHEMISRY: Callum Ormonde (University of Western Australia) and colleagues, for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.

LITERATURE: Mark Dingemanse of Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands and colleagues, for discovering that the word “huh?” (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language and for not being quite sure why.

Well, some years are better than others where wackiness and fun of Ig Nobel prize-winning submissions goes. I remember laughing much harder in prior years. Which makes me think… Ah, never mind. Might as well be that with the passage of years I’ve become a grumpier person. But then again, see for yourself and recall your favorite Ig Nobel winners:  Celebrating 25 years of wacky Ig Nobel Prize brilliance. 

Mozart Meets Parkinson

Psychologists have long known that music is good for us. It stirs positive emotions, improves blood flow to the brain and muscles, cranking up our mental abilities and physical endurance.

And a recent study, published on March 31, 2015, showed how music affects us at the genetic level. The effect of music performance on the transcriptome of professional musicians.

According to a recent announcement from the University of Helsinki, Finland, listening to classical music enhances the activity of genes responsible for brain functions, including dopamine secretion and transport, synaptic neurotransmission, learning, and memory. A study by a Finnish team of researchers showed that listening to classical music down-regulated genes that mediate neurodegeneration, and up-regulated several genes known to be responsible for song learning and singing in songbirds, suggesting a common evolutionary background of sound perception across species. (Listening to Classical Music Enhances Genes Linked to Brain Functions.)

In a nutshell, this is what Finnish scientists (Kanduri et al.) have done: They invited a group of people with different attitude to music and different musical abilities to take part in the study. In the group there were professional musicians as well as music lovers who played no musical instruments, people totally indifferent to music and “everyone in between.” Blood tests were performed on participants’ blood samples before and after “subjecting” the group to music.

People didn’t know what would be played to them. The researchers agreed on Mozart Violin Concerto No.3 in G Major K. 216, lasting around 20 minutes.

It was found that during the 20 minutes of Mozart, in some people certain genes were notably activated (the paper uses the term up-regulated.)

The up-regulated genes were found to affect dopaminergic neurotransmission, motor behavior, neuronal plasticity, and neurocognitive functions including learning and memory. Particularly, candidate genes such as SNCA, FOS and DUSP1 that are involved in song perception and production in songbirds, were identified, suggesting an evolutionary conservation in biological processes related to sound perception/production. (–From the published paper.)

SNCA, the gene involved in the production and transport of serotonin, an important neurotransmitter that provides work memory and learning. When SNCA is “off”, the likelihood of Parkinson’s disease is greatly increased. At the same time, listening to music down-regulated genes that are associated with neurodegeneration, thus listening to music may have a neuroprotective effect.

Music performance is also known to induce emotion-related psychophysiological responses and generate a robust brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns. However, the molecular mechanisms and biological pathways mediating the effects of music performance so far remain unknown.(–From the published paper.)

Unfortunately to those people who aren’t musically inclined, “The effect was only detectable in musically experienced participants, suggesting the importance of familiarity and experience in mediating music-induced effects,” the researchers remarked in a University of Helsinki announcement.

As a quick remedy, do your SNCA a favor and listen:

All Happy Nations…

When reading a news article, sometimes (more often then not, actually) one might think that everything is bad.  Some other time, reading some other article/column or news release, one might get an impression that everything is fine. Does this mean that reading a huge stream of various articles  “everything is bad” negates “everything is fine” and the result is simply neutral?

Psychologists, however, know that life is more complicated than that. Aren’t we all know this, too? Dozens of experiments show that people, in general, tend to describe events in a positive rather than negative way, even if in fact the events are rather neutral, bland or, at times, even pretty shitty. Pollyanna principle is in full effect here.

Thousands of subjects in these experiments strove to present different situations so that they look prettier, using “good” words and avoiding “bad” ones.

Thus scientists have realized that if, in accordance with Pollyanna principle  people choose “good” words more often than not in their speech then it must somehow be reflected in human language.

That is, if you collect all the words and give them a “positivity test”, the average should be not neutral, as suggested above, but positive (albeit based on, well, nothing much.) In short, after reading lotsa-lotsa-lotsa texts in any language there must remain a vague feeling that, in general, everything isn’t all that bad, no matter what detractors say.

When back when — before Internet, that is — to test this hypothesis experimentally was easier said than done. In practice, this meant collecting tens of thousands of words in different languages, presenting them to at least a hundred native speakers, recording whether the word, in the opinion of each subject, is “good” or “bad”. Then researchers should have determined the “average happiness score” of each word and applied it to the real body of texts in corresponding language…

It would have been an extremely tedious task if not altogether impossible task before the internet. Nowadays things have changed.

Mathematicians and linguists from Vermont took up the case, put together a research group, set to work, got results and published them in PNAS — the article  Human language reveals a universal positivity bias.

It turned out that the hypothesis was true: in all studied languages the distribution of words in their emotional “coloring” markedly shifted toward the positive. Here are the distribution of words in the emotional variance:

‘[…] we show distributions of the average happiness scores for all 24 corpora, leading to our most general observation of a clear positivity bias in natural language. We indicate the above-neutral part of each distribution with yellow and the below-neutral part with blue, and we order the distributions moving upward by increasing median (vertical red line). For all corpora, the median clearly exceeds the neutral score of 5. The background gray lines connect deciles for each distribution.

“In terms of emotional variance, all four English corpora are among the highest, whereas Chinese and Russian Google Books seem especially constrained.”

Thus mathematicians and linguists have found that people аre prone to wishful thinking in every which language, but Spanish is best for it. More images, tables and pictures here.

Any application for these results? Linguists selected books in three languages ​​(English, French and Russian) and, using the developed methods, measured the “level of hapiness” as it fluctuated from the first to the last chapter of each book.

The most cheerful of the selected English-language books was Moby Dick, while The Count of Monte Cristo came out average, and — no surprise here — Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky embodied the darkest abyss imaginable.

Thinking Is Bad For You!?

Don’t think or else… you die. If you have a deadly brain tumor that is. If brain tumor is a fire, then thinking is a fuel to make it burning and spreading. A new study, Brain tumor growth stimulated by nerve activity in the cortex, from Stanford University School of Medicine, proves it.

Recently published in the journal Cell, the research found that nerve activity in the cerebral cortex — simply put, thinking — promotes the growth brain tumors. Conducted in mice with an aggressive human brain cancer implanted in their brains, the study is the first to demonstrate the above finding.

“Clinically, fighting high-grade gliomas is a lot like trying to fight a forest fire,” said Monje, who is also  “Our new findings indicate that this metaphorical forest fire has been difficult to extinguish because there is something akin to gasoline seeping up from the soil.”  (–Michelle Monje, MD, PhD, senior author of the study, assistant professor of neurology at the School of Medicine and a pediatric neuro-oncologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, where she cares for patients with these tumors.)

MRI of the tumor (top) and glioma cells growing in a lab dish (bottom).

Then, if even the most basic patterns of neuronal activity promoted tumor growth, to fight it one should stop thinking?

“Blocking or silencing neuronal activity, such as would occur in a medically-induced coma, is not a good therapeutic option,” Dr Monje said. She believes that the answer isn’t reducing brain activity. Rather, it’s targeting the specific ways that neuronal activity promotes glioma growth.

Young Blood

For the Ancient Greeks, blood was a magical elixir.  Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) — author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire — described the mad rush of spectators into arenas to drink the blood of fallen gladiators.

Centuries later, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499),  an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance, promoted drinking young blood as a means to regain youthful vigor.

Of course, this was the time of the Inquisition, and the Inquisition was known to come down hard on that kind of thing.

The first recorded attempt of a blood transfusion was described by Stefano Infessura, the 15th-century chronicler. He details the illness and eventual demise of Pope Innocent VIII.

Pope Innocent VIII lay dying. His physician, Giacomo di San Genesio, gave him a blood transfusion orally, as the concept of intravenous circulation had not yet been invented. Three boys, age 10, agreed to this experiment after being promised a ducat each. Unfortunately but predictably, the Pope and all three boys died.

Needless to say, this tragic and brutal event (and, perhaps, a few more unrecorded transfusions) was itself infused with myth and plenty of speculations. Some claimed that Pope Innocent VIII had habitually drunk the blood of Jewish boys and that his last libation was a drink of young blood pumped out of the three non-Christian youngsters veins.

Pope Innocent VIII  after ingesting blood of young boys, at the entrance into the Heavenly Kingdom. Seriously.

Enough of history for now. After all,

Centuries passed. Blood transfusions are performed routinely every day, and to a great benefit to people (and animals) who need them.

Even vampires are no longer quite as scary as they used to be in real life and in folks lore of the past. A great number of them in novels and movies are cool, if somewhat pale in appearance, metro-sexual creatures. On a protein rich diet of fresh blood of virginal maidens, the sexy bloodsuckers stay young forever…

600 years ago, Marsilio Ficino taught that drinking young blood is a sure-fire way to stay springy, vigorous and youthful well into an old age. It seems that the results of the latest scientific research agree with Ficino’s claim.

No, not drinking blood — bloody libations should be left to vampires and past Popes — but, well, blood sharing.

The procedure is called parabiosis. The first parabiosis experiments were conducted at Cornell University in the 1950s. Clive M. McCay and his colleagues  joined rats in pairs by stitching together the skin on their flanks. Blood vessels grew and joined the rats’ circulatory systems. The bloodstreams of the young and the old rat were now flowing as one, supplying both animals.

In a form of visual aid, parabiosis might be described and pictured something like this:

Necropsies performed after the experiment showed that the old rat benefited tremendously from the procedure — its cartilage looked “younger” than it would have otherwise and its fur shone like that of a much younger rodent. How exactly such transformations happened? The researchers had no definitive answer at the time — the actual “mechanics” of the body rejuvenating itself was still a mystery.

This might have been at least part of the reason why the technique of parabiosis fell out of favor after the 1970s.

In the past few years parabiosis has been revived and several labs are known to use it and forge ahead getting results.

In Revival of Parabiosis, Young Blood Rejuvenates Aging Microglia, Cognition the same questions asked and an attempt is made to answer them:

As the brain ages, its microglial cells turn sluggish in their task of ingesting and degrading toxic products, and the flow of blood through its micro vessels slows. Are there components in the blood that age the brain—and can renew it?

The data offered a provocative new twist on the old specter of rejuvenation with young blood. It also reflected the power of heterochronic parabiosis, a surgical protocol of conjoining the blood supply of a young and an old mouse to study complex pathophysiological processes. 

Parabiosis involves suturing the body walls of two mice together such that their capillaries fuse. The mice then live like Siamese twins joined through their blood supply. At the Zilkha conference, Wyss-Coray said that pairing an 18-month-old with a 3-month-old mouse, and letting them live together for five weeks, reversed microglial aging. (From the article.)

These two mice, one old one young, live with a shared blood supply. [Image courtesy of Tony Wyss-Coray.]

Young Blood May Hold Key to Reversing Aging  is an article in the New York Times published MAY 4, 2014.

Ageing research: Blood to blood is an article in Nature. The bi-line says: By splicing animals together, scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues. Now, they are testing whether it works for humans.

“After the team [of researchers at Rando Lab] published its results, Rando’s phone started ringing incessantly. Some of the calls were from men’s health magazines looking for ways to build muscle; others were from people fascinated by the prospect of forestalling death. They wanted to know whether young blood extended lifespan.

But despite the hints that this was true from the 1970s, no one has yet properly tested the idea. It would be an expensive, labour-intensive experiment.” (From the article in Nature.)

As electrosensitive as they are…

Photographerphcreated a series of pictures looking at people who suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) or Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance Attributed to Electromagnetic Fields (IEI-EMF). The condition is deemed controversial by medical sciences.

The stories of British people in Thomas Ball photographs, however, are quite compelling.

Tim Hallam, 37, Leamington Spa.

Tim is a graduate from Cambridge University. He has gone to great lengths to insulate his bedroom and has fitted foil on the walls, under the floor and on the ceiling. He sleeps in a custom-made silver coated fabric sleeping bag at night, which he says helps to block out electromagnetic fields. Tim can’t work in an office environment and the condition has severely impacted his career aspirations. He currently drives a supermarket delivery van.

“Where I’m living now, it’s not a great situation. I’m lucky that the shielding worked to a large degree. But I would love to live somewhere I didn’t have to live in a metal box and sleep in a bag, where I could go to a café and see my friends, go to the cinema, all those things that people take for granted.”

Brian Stein (64), Nottinghamshire.

“Generally speaking, people don’t talk about it. Can you imagine that you can’t use a computer, you can’t watch TV, you can’t fly on a plane, go on a train, stay in hotels, or walk round the high street when there’s wi-fi?  My credibility in my job was very very important to me.  So did I talk to customers about this to begin with?  Not at all, but there came a point in time, where I took the view, if Brian Stein doesn’t speak out about this, who will?”

Hannah Metcalfe, Kent.

Hannah suffered from psoriasis as a child and started sun bed treatment at the age of 9, to help clear up her skin. In her late twenties, she started developing severe migraines and fatigue when working in offices with fluorescent lights. She always felt discomfort when using a mobile phone. The severity of her symptoms got worse when she later discovered a sensitivity to wi-fi. As a result of her sensitivities Hannah gave up her job as a trainee criminal solicitor in 2010 and now lives with her husband and two children on a farm in Kent.

“When I realised that wi-fi was making me ill, and I also turned off the digital phone; so [there] was nothing wireless in the house, I just went from feeling like this sluggish person, to feeling so vibrant and alive, with so much energy. Just amazing to feel well.”

Michael Bevington, Stowe School, Buckinghamshire.

Michael has been a Classics teacher for 34 years.

In 2006, the school had wi-fi fitted in his classroom. He immediately developed symptoms of severe headache and heart palpitations. As he had been working in the same classroom for many years without any ill-health, he was able to quickly attribute his symptoms to the wi-fi. He asked the school for it to be removed and returned to a wired connection instead, and his symptoms at work went away.

Raphael Cuesto, London.

In 2004, while working for a telecommunications company in Kuala Lumpur, Raphael noticed that he was developing pains in his arms and hands every time he worked on his laptop. His symptoms got worse and he began getting headaches and heart palpitations from using his mobile for only a few minutes, and this progressed to almost immediate pain when he brought the phone near his head. He decided to stop using his mobile altogether and left his job in the telecoms industry. He is now a teacher and lives in London.

“When you spend a minute on the phone and get palpitations, you know you have to do something about it. I remember one day turning [over] a piece of paper and writing in the middle of the page ‘jobs without a mobile phone’. I had to change everything.”

There is plenty more pictures and stories where these came from.

Is there a place on earth where EHS sufferers can live undisturbed by electromagnetic fields?

Yes, there is. The place is a tiny town called Green Bank, West Virginia, USA, population 143.

The residents of Green Bank can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology because of a government ban. The reason of the ban? Green Bank houses Robert C. Byrd telescope, a gleaming white, 485-foot-tall behemoth of a dish that looms over the town.

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In Green Bank, you can’t make a call on your cell phone, and you can’t text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. It’s a premodern place by design, devoid of the gadgets and technologies that define life today. And thanks to Uncle Sam, it will stay that way: The town is part of a federally mandated zone where a government high-tech facility’s needs come first. Wireless signals are verboten.

In electromagnetic terms, it’s the quietest place on Earth—blanketed by the kind of silence that’s golden to electrosensitives […] (– From the article in Washingtonian. The article has the stories of technophobes and electrosensitives  who recently moved to Green Bank.)

She Had No Fear

Poster by Joe Scorsone, Alice Drueding

In a nutshell: The autonomic responses associated with fear and hormonal secretions is the function of the amygdala. Scientific studies of the amygdala have led to the discovery of the location of neurons in the amygdala that are responsible for fear conditioning. Fear conditioning is an associative learning process by which we learn through repeated experiences to fear something.

There was an article in Current Biology, a case study of patient called SM — a rare human patient with focal bilateral amygdala lesions. Scientists admit that it was the first investigation of the induction and experience of fear in such a patient.

To provoke fear in SM, she was exposed to a number fear-inducing situations: live snakes and spiders, a tour of a haunted house, emotionally evocative films — you name it, the woman had it all.

Patient SM failed to exhibit fear behaviors, and demonstrated an overall impoverished experience of fear. Her response indicated NO activation of the sympathetic division of the peripheral nervous system: no accelerated heart rate, no dilated pupils, no increase in metabolic rate, and no increase in blood flow to the muscles. All of the above normally triggers a state of fear, and the human amygdala is responsible for it.

The SM woman with damaged amygdala was afraid of nothing and, after 3 months of experiments, reported in multiple questionnaires that shе was, in fact, fearless. Everything else about her emotional makeup was quite ordinary.  SM’s neuropsychological profile has been stable for the past two decades. She performed perfectly within the normal range on standardized tests of IQ, memory, language etc. Conclusion: if there is no triggering mechanism in the brain then there is no state of fear and, consequently, no fear itself.

Interesting that the ancient Incas, as archaeological evidence suggests, might have had the rudimentary knowledge of neurosurgery.  Here is an ancient Peruvian skull with evidence of trepanation (a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the human skull.)

Inca warriors were famously fearless, and many fallen soldiers had holes drilled in their heads… Could their surgeons (or priests or barbers) have figured out where inside the warriors’ heads hides their fear and gone straight for amygdala with an ancient drill to create a monstrously fearless army?

Another interesting article on the subject of fear and amygdala:  The Amygdala Is Not The Fear Centre, Scientist Now Claim!

Oh, For Haven’s Sake!

Robots with intelligence equal to or beyond that of humans is called “strong AI” or “strong AGI” where AGI stads for Artificial General Intelligence.  When, one wonders, technology to create strong AI will become an everyday occurrence? Some experts are betting it will happen in the next two decades.

Great! No?

In the past year, people-in-the-know — Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking among others — have warned about an eminent to threat to humanity — the rise of super-intelligent robots. (More on the subject: AI Or Die — Summoning The Demon and Number 1 Risk For This Century.)

What would their super-intelligent high-tech “brains” makeup be? Would super-intelligent robots have any MORALS whatsoever? What moral compass will guide them while their superior intelligence, having digested the entire uploaded Wikipedia, start developing ideas of their own?

What could be better than religion, right? No?

Shouldn’t any superintelligence created by humans have a notion of God?

Preaching God to automatons, no matter how autonomous, sounds kind of wacky, no?

Actually, not so much, if one doesn’t overlook statistics of U.S. demographics in relation to Christianity. About 75 percent of adult Americans identify themselves as Christians, and 92 percent of our highest politicians in U.S. Congress belong to one or another denomination of Christian faith.

An associate Pastor of Providence at the Presbyterian Church in Florida, Reverend Dr Christopher Benek, believes religions may help AI live alongside mankind.He is convinced that AIs won’t be worse than us or that they will intentionally mistreat people.

‘I don’t see Christ’s redemption limited to human beings. It’s redemption to all of creation, even AI. If AI is autonomous, then we should encourage it to participate in Christ’s redemptive purposes in the world.’ (from a recent Gizmodo interview with  Reverend Benek by  Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager.)

The question of “soul” is quintessential in the coming transhumanist age of machine intelligence. Does AI have a soul? Can it be saved?

Marvin Minksy, a pioneer on the field of artificial intelligence and an MIT professor doesn’t see why not.

‘What humans have is a more complex and larger brain than any other animal — maybe a whale’s brain is physically large, but it’s not structurally more complex than ours,‘ he told the Jerusalem Post.

‘If you left a computer by itself, or a community of them together, they would try to figure out where they came from and what they are.’

Even Pope Francis recently sounded off on the possibility of aliens being converted when he affirmed that the Holy Spirit blows where it will.

Dominican monk robot?

Pope Francis said he would welcome Martians to receive baptism. Would the Catholic Church be as welcoming to a fanciful pile of electronically wired inorganic hardware created by human hands?

Also, god knows what surprises alien chemistry holds… No wonder some scientists are seriously suggesting that alien life that earthlings meet one day might as well be smartly put together alien machines.

To think of it, earthlings that aliens meet might be human-made super-advanced AGIs. What if these machines greet extraterrestrials with a smile and warm “Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior?”   “Allahu akbar!”  “Namaste” or whatnot.

Once you start thinking like that, it opens up even more questions: How would AI fit into to the religious tension already present around the world? Who is to say a machine with human intelligence wouldn’t choose to become a fundamentalist Muslim, or a Jehova Witness, or a born-again Christian who prefers to speak in tongues instead of a form of communication we understand? If it decides to literally follow any of the sacred religions texts verbatim, as some humans attempt to do, then it could add to already existing religious tensions in the world.  (Zoltan Istvan’s  article in Gizmodo When Superintelligent AI Arrives…)

Interesting article, actually, with a great number of  amusing comments too…

‘Who is to say that one day AIs might not even lead humans to new levels of holiness?’  Indeed. That is, if humans would reach ANY level of holiness by the time THEY arrive.

 

Take Risk Or Risk Not Taking It

Why teenagers take more risk and more often than adults?  What “mechanism” inside of our brains decides which impulse to follow —  fight or flight?

“Biology of Risk Taking” is a 5 minutes scientific short film created by Stefane Lefort for an exhibition about risk in La Cité des Sciences et de l’industrie de Paris and produced by E-magineurs > e-magineurs.com.

Aquatilis

 

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“Aquatilis” is a unique expedition to begin in the fall of 2015. Its main goal is the study of plankton, the most important element of the food chain and environmental well-being indicator of the planet.

Aquatilis organizer, Alexander Semenov, is a marine biologist, the head of the Moscow State University’s White Sea Biological Station diving services and a renowned underwater photographer.

Alexander Semenov is the author of the photos appearing in this post. Mr. Semenov’s  jellyfish, nudibranchs, comb jellies and other underwater creatures were published in Nature, Science, National Geographic, BBC Knowledge, BBC Focus, CNN, Daily Mail, The Telegraph.

The team Aquatilis is a team of  scientists, divers, photographers, cameramen and sailors. They are professionals — ambitious and terribly fond of his work. Having professional divers on the team means that they can explore planktonic organisms in their immediate environment. This is particularly important in the case of gelatinous plankton, some of its representatives so fragile that the first touch may be their last.

Hyperia Galba. The quiet life of this White Sea jellyfish is greatly complicated by small crustaceans — parasites, settling in the body of jellyfish and devouring its soft tissue, tearing off pieces of jellyfish and, using their forelimbs, shoving the  food in their mouths.

The young scientists plan to share with the world photographs and videos much in the same fashion Jacques-Yves Cousteau did when he “uncovered” and “shared” the ocean with the world. Since Cousteau, nobody attempted expedition of comparable scale, using the latest equipment and the power of media platforms and social networks. Ocean still remains largely unexplored.

Serpula uschakovi is a polychaetes (worms) living in hard calcareous tubes that they themselves build. Outside the tube is only corolla of tentacles with which serpula breathes and eats. The basic diet consists of suspended in water and organic particles of small plankton. One of the tentacles of these worms is modified to make Operculum — a special lid that seals the tube in case of danger. Photographing them is extremely difficult process: they are afraid of any rustle and immediately hide in the tube.

“Also, we want to draw people’s attention to the problems of ocean pollution. We plan to visit the “garbage islands” of the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The size of these accumulations of floating debris and particulate plastics is huge, exceeding the area of some countries, such as Spain or Germany, for example. We want to show the extent of pollution and what happens to the animals in the sea of plastic…” (– A. Semenov)

Aurelia aurita, quite literally, turns the ocean into jelly. Aurelia is the most common jellyfish in the oceans. Sometimes they form huge gatherings, turning the sea into a solid jelly. Aurelia feeds on small plankton, guiding it to its mouth by gentle movements of its dome-head, on the edge of which sit hundreds of the finest tentacles. These tentacles paralyze or kill small crustaceans, funneling them into his mouth.

“People around the world need to understand the consequences of one bottle thrown into the sea. If at least a few thousand people will think  before throwing trash overboard or leaving it behind on the beach, it’ll be a small but significant step towards a clean ocean.” (– A. Semenov)

Lucernaria quadricornis: This jellyfish sits, kills and eats. Sessile jellyfish usually attaches itself to kelp or seaweed and waits sacrifice, its “hands” with bunches of sticky tentacles outstretched. Once some careless creature touches them, it shoots hundreds of stinging cells, and paralyzed or killed victim goes straight into its mouth. Afterwards, jellyfish is “closed” for lunch. Scary beast indeed, though very beautiful.

Aquatilis will use a system of ropes to dive at any point in the ocean or in the middle of the sea, where the depth of water beneath the submerged divers is hundreds, or even thousands of meters. It’s called Bluewater diving, the best and perhaps the only method of studying life full of gelatinous plankton organisms. Dodge sharks and you are in business.

Anemones Metridium farcimen from the Sea of Okhotsk.

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“I just madly in love with the whole underwater world. And I’m terribly curious to see the sea creatures. For me it’s like real cosmos — Star Trek, Starcraft and Babylon 5 rolled into one.”(– A. Semenov)