I just don’t have it in me anymore to deal with angry or upset people. This is said after years of patience and many sordid experiences in the extreme. I don’t understand why or how to help individuals in my family (and by extension associates and my fellow man) who are like this and I don’t really care to keep trying at my own expense. Can’t you feel how this kind of emotion and behavior is rotting you out from the inside? It doesn’t just erode you, it slowly destroys all the joy in the good human beings you might be blessed to have around you.
I’m convinced: Insanity is other people.
…when one has been through so much gritty shit that an eerie serenity begins accompanying situations that would normally at least really stress people out. I’m not saying the stress response is absent in me, but I don’t know if this calm is a good or bad thing. What does it point to? Wisdom and experience, or just a jaded but steely perspective? I’m gonna go with a little of column A and healthy serving of column B.
Your Brain on Shrooms
Shown here are the effects of psilocybin that the researchers observed. Regions labeled in blue indicate a decrease in brain activity. Many people have either had or heard of mind-bending experiences attributable to psilocybin — so if you or someone you know has experimented with mushrooms, the fact that the researchers’ observations reflected a decrease in brain activity during a trip will probably strike you as odd. What’s going on here, man?
“Psychedelics are thought of as ‘mind-expanding’ drugs, so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity. Surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas.”
Did you catch that? The most important thing to take away from this study isn’t the fact that brain activity decreased, it’s where the activity decreased. The greatest dips in activity were observed in regions of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices (ACC and PCC, respectively). And as if that wasn’t enough, the researchers’ findings also suggest that psilocybin takes its disabling effects one step further by disrupting connections between the mPFC and PCC.
You can think of your mPFC, PCC, and a third region of your brain called the thalamus, as transportation hubs that coordinate the flow of information throughout your brain. Decreased activity within and between the brain’s hubs allows for “an unconstrained style of cognition.”
What the hell does that mean? Mo Costandi fleshes things out for us, with a little help from Aldous Huxley:
In his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, novelist Aldous Huxley, who famously experimented with psychedelics, suggested that the drugs produce a sensory deluge by opening a “reducing valve” in the brain that normally acts to limit our perceptions.
The new findings are consistent with this idea, and with the free-energy principle of brain function developed by Karl Friston of University College London that states that the brain works by constraining our perceptual experiences so that its predictions of the world are as accurate as possible.
(via io9)
13-Year-Old Makes Solar Power Breakthrough by Harnessing the Fibonacci Sequence
While most 13-year-olds spend their free time playing video games or cruising Facebook, one 7th grader was trekking through the woods uncovering a mystery of science. After studying how trees branch in a very specific way, Aidan Dwyer created a solar cell tree that produces 20-50% more power than a uniform array of photovoltaic panels. His impressive results show that using a specific formula for distributing solar cells can drastically improve energy generation. The study earned Aidan a provisional U.S patent – it’s a rare find in the field of technology and a fantastic example of how biomimicry can drastically improve design.
Aidan Dwyer took a hike through the trees last winter and took notice of patterns in the mangle of branches. His studies into how they branch in very specific ways lead him to a central guiding formula, the Fibonacci sequence. Take a number, add it to the number before it in a sequence like 1+1=2 then 2+1=3 then 3+2=5, 8, 13, 21 and so on a very specific pattern emerges. Turns out the pattern and its corresponding ratios are reflected in nature all the time, and Aidan’s keen observation of how trees branch according to the formula lead him to test the theory. First he measured tree branches by how often they branch and at what degree from each other.
To see why they branch this way he built a small solar array using the Fibonacci formula, stepping cells at specific intervals and heights. He then compared the energy output with identical cells set in a row. Aidan reports the results: “The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!”
His results did turn out to be incorrect though. Voltage (what he measured) is not an accurate measure of energy from a solar cell– he measured higher voltage simply because he swept a larger portion of sky. Solar cells in series are as only as good as the weakest one, so the tree design is only as good as the worst positioned cell for amperage, which multiplied by voltage creates usable energy.
This story is very inspiring and I think that Aiden’s passion to unravel a mystery shows how exciting the path of scientific discovery is. Impressively he is demonstrating the power of biomimicry — a concept that many see as the pinnacle of good design, but one that thus far has been exceptionally difficult to achieve. Way to go!
+ The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees
(via @heidiko44)
(Source: rae-elizabeth, via lucifelle)
Every day is another chance to discover and create something wonderful in the world. I’m thankful we all have platforms like this to share a little bit of it. :)
via Poptech
“We have now learned that there are these languages that are occurring in communication between each organism. If we don’t get our act together and come in commonality and understanding with the organisms that sustain us today, not only will we destroy those organisms, but we will destroy ourselves. ” ~Paul Stamets
The leap from our universe to another is theoretically possible, say physicists. And the technology to test the idea is available today
The idea that our universe is embedded in a broader multidimensional space has captured the imagination of scientists and the general population alike.
This notion is not entirely science fiction. According to some theories, our cosmos may exist in parallel with other universes in other sets of dimensions. Cosmologists call these universes braneworlds. And among that many prospects that this raises is the idea that things from our Universe might somehow end up in another.
A couple of years ago, Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few others showed how matter might make the leap in the presence of large magnetic potentials. That provided a theoretical basis for real matter swapping.
Today, Sarrazin and a few pals say that our galaxy might produce a magnetic potential large enough to make this happen for real. If so, we ought to be able to observe matter leaping back and forth between universes in the lab. In fact, such observations might already have been made in certain experiments.
The experiments in question involve trapping ultracold neutrons in bottles at places like the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, and the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. Ultracold neutrons move so slowly that it is possible to trap them using ‘bottles’ made of magnetic fields, ordinary matter and even gravity.
One reason to do this is to measure how quickly the neutrons decay by beta emission. So physicists measure the rate at which the neutrons hit the bottle walls and how quickly this drops.
There are two processes at work here: the rate of neutron decay and the rate at which neutrons escape from the bottle. So in the case of an ideal bottle, the rate of decay should be equal to the beta decay rate. But the bottles are not ideal so the rate of decay is always faster.
That leaves open the possibility that there might be a third process at work: that some of the extra decay might be the result of neutrons jumping from our universe to another.
So Sarrazin and co have used the measured decay rates to place an upper limit on how often this can happen.
Their conclusion is that the probability of a neutron jumping ship is smaller than about one in a million.
That doesn’t really say anything about whether matter swapping actually takes place. Only that if it does, it doesn’t happen very often.
However, Sarrazzin and co also say it should be straightforward to take better data that places stricter limits.
According to their theoretical work, a change in the gravitational potential should also influence the rate of matter swapping. So one idea is to carry out a neutron trapping experiment that lasts for a year or more, allowing the Earth to complete at least one orbit of the Sun.
In that time, the gravitational potential changes in a way that should influence the rate of matter swapping. Indeed, there ought to be an annual cycle. “If one can detect such a modulation it would be a strong indication that matter swapping really occurs,” they say.
That would be one of the biggest and most controversial discoveries in modern physics and one that is possible with technologies available today.
Anyone got an old neutron bottle lying around and a bit of spare time on their hands?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1201.3949: Experimental Limits On Neutron Disappearance Into Another Braneworld
(via Technology Review)
Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity
It’s a wonder man can eat at all
When things are big that should be small
Who can tell what magic spells we’ll be doing for us
And I’m giving all my love to this world
Only to be told
I can’t see
I can’t breathe
No more will we be…
