July 2011

Scientists Find Evidence that Humans and Neanderthals Mated Ouside of Africa

Recent evidence shows that humans outside the African continent mated with Neanderthals.

    

It's long been known that Neanderthals and early Cro-Magnon man coexisted early on, but it has never been established how or why Neanderthals went extinct well before the advent of civilization. Some theories include inter-species warfare, or even inter-breeding that eventually "bred out" the Neanderthal line. In fact, author Jean Auel and others have made a career of postulating what the relationship between early humans and Neanderthals may have looked like. Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead even reimagined the story of Beowulf as fighting not dragons or monsters, but a race of mountain-dwelling Neanderthals that cannibalized the local human population. According to recent findings by the University of Montreal Pediatrics, as reported on Wired Science, there is strong evidence of what that relationship may have actually looked like, and it seems Neanderthals and early humans were close...very close.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey on Longevity

Will humans live for hundreds of years?

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is working on ways which he and transhumanists believe would allow humans to live for hundreds of years. While Dr. de Gray’s ideas might seem like something more likely to be found in a Tom Robbins or Philip K. Dick novel, his research indicates that the seven biochemical effects of aging can be reversed in humans.  

Physicists Propose Space-Time Cloak

Fiber optics may hold the key to masking events

 

 

I love when a headline straight out of a science fiction movie shows up on a website like National Geographic. Physicists at Imperial College London are now playing with the idea of space-time invisibility cloaks. That is, cloaks that mask not just an object but an entire event from outside observers. 

Can you imagine? A bank heist could take place right under all the security in the world, completely invisible, only noticed when a few million dollars are mysteriously gone. There would be no observable trace of the robbers or their misdeeds. By the time the bank figured out what they were missing, the crafty wielders of physics would be driving away with piles of cash. Sounds like the foundation for a new futuristic crime show.

Personality tests encourage and categorize identical behaviors

 

I had to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) several times in my life.  My personality apparently from high school to college—I became more extroverted as I emerged from teenaged angst, perhaps?—so the solidity of the test’s outcome crumbled for me then.  My college-aged personality indicated that I would be a CEO, an unlikely career for someone who hates business politics and power plays.  

 

Every time I took the test, I felt like I was reading a fortune cookie.  Type descriptions described me—and everyone else I knew with slightly different adjectives—as warmhearted, outgoing and friendly and said that I wanted to make work fun! Each personality type’s description is vague and non-threatening, crafted, it seems, to fit everyone fairly well and to make each person think that his or her personality type is best.  I remember bonding with my fellow—exceedingly rare—INTJ personality type in high school, but what would we have in common now that I have changed? 

 

Most people take the MBTI more seriously than I do, sincerely using it to pick careers and shape social interactions.  What is about this short questionnaire that makes people think the Type Indicator has them pegged?  And, perhaps more frightening, what makes people want to get pegged in the first place?  

 

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung introduced the idea of psychological types in the 1920s.  Isabel Briggs Myers continued with his research in the 1940’s and 1950’s, with the first publication of the indicator in 1962.  The MBTI is said to be valid and reliable.  Psychologists say that it both measures what it says it will and will remain the same each time the tester takes the assessment.  

Fusion to Meet the Energy Needs of the Future

ITER creates a hot fusion science experiment that may determine energy capabilities of the future.

    

On PopSci.com this week was a feature on ITER's hot fusion reaction experiment. The project, which is an international effort of scientists and engineers from the U.S., Russia, China, Korea, Japan, and the European Union, in the works for decades, but wasn't officially underway until November 2006, when the ITER agreement between the constituent nations was signed in Paris. Since then these nations have worked together with the understanding that energy demands will skyrocket in the coming decades and that our current means of energy production will be insufficient. According to the ITER website, energy demands are projected to triple by the end of the century, yet as fossil fuel costs continue to rise despite global recession and companies are forced to adopt dirtier methods of extraction it has become clear that fossil fuels are dwindling. The ITER Team, and its constituent nations, have decided that fusion is the answer.

Lovotics: Engineering Robots Capable of Feeling Love

How "Lovotics" enginners are attempting to give robots fuzzy feelings too

     Artificial Intelligence, more commonly known as AI, has been a pop-culture fascination for years now, even decades. One of the central arguments in the development of AI is how, or even if, a robot can be programmed to feel authentic human emotions. Well, the authenticity part may be debatable, but self-described "Lovotics" engineers at the National University of Singapore are attempting to build robots capable of creating a human-robot bond of love, both psychologically and biologically.