Science, Technology & Health: February 2009 Archives
How do I get in on this research? Apparently men's brains light up when they look at pictures of nearly-naked women.
New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.
Uh, yeah. There's no way that was written with a straight face.
What other groundbreaking results has this research come up with?
Previous research found that people tend to similarly dehumanize those who are homeless or drug addicts, although the phenomenon in this case is somewhat different, Fiske said. People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.
Wait, men are more attracted to scantily clad women than to homeless drug addicts?! I'll need to research this myself.
This article about the link between gestures and future vocabulary is interesting, but fatally flawed.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking that the lexical gap between rich and poor appears when children are still toddlers and can continue throughout their school life. What is it about a family's socioeconomic status that so strongly affects their child's linguistic fate at such an early age?
That's not striking to me. It seems very likely that socioeconomic status and "linguistic fate" are both effects of the same underlying cause-that-shall-not-be-named: smarter genes.
(HT: NW.)
Saint Louis University has unveiled a new lab with robotic patients that train military medics to handle injuries more serious than the medics typically see while working on real patients.
Saint Louis University has opened a new teaching laboratory that will give medical service men and women heading to Iraq and Afghanistan the chance to practice lifesaving procedures on several robotic patients with many injuries.Students will show how they treat the kinds of injuries typically seen on battlegrounds and at busy trauma hospitals at the grand opening Tuesday of the new Saint Louis University School of Medicine Emergency Medicine Trauma Simulation Lab, the university said Monday.
Here's one of the best potentially habitable extra-solar planets: Gliese 581 d.
Although Gliese 581 d orbits outside the theoretical habitable zone of its star, scientists surmise that conditions on the planet may be conducive to supporting life.[4][5] Scientists originally believed that Gliese 581 d would be too cold for liquid water to exist, and therefore could not support life in forms as existing on Earth. However, since Earth's temperature would be about -18°C[6] without any greenhouse gases, and due to a theorized greenhouse effect of Gliese 581 d, research now suggests that atmospheric conditions on the planet could create temperatures at which liquid water can exist, and therefore the planet may be capable of supporting life.[7][8][9]
A regular home internet user may not realize it, but current technology allows data to be transmitted much faster than it can be processed. Your home network connection sends data far slower than your desktop can handle it, but at the top end of the technology spectrum the bottleneck is processing, not data transmission. Fortunately, techniques for faster signal sampling are improving!
Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego have achieved world-record speeds for real-time signal processing in an effort to meet ambitious goals set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the first Terabit-scale technology for optical processing. The technology could have widespread ramifications for networking, computing, defense and other industries.UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Stojan Radic and his team have demonstrated the first real-time sampling of a 320 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) channel, setting multiple records in the process. ...
“For the first time we have been able to process signals as fast as 320 Gb/s by making more than eight copies of the signal and simultaneously sampling all the copies – thereby allowing us to do real-time processing,” said Radic, a professor in UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering. The aggregate speed was a record, as were the number of copies simultaneously sampled. The demonstration also registered a five-fold improvement in a published optical delay demonstration." ...
The goal of the four-year project is to reach one Terabit per second processing with a single technology platform,” said Radic. “A little over one year into the project, we have achieved one-third of that speed, which is about an order-of-magnitude faster than the advanced commercial optical transport at 40 Gb/s.”
Very cool. It will be years before this technology gets into your home, but just imagine downloading your entire harddrive in one second.... DVD and BluRay won't be able to compete in a world where that much data can be streamed to users so fast.
