Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

A new blood test was just announced for quickly diagnosing anxiety. Next, the makers plan to release a blood test for diagnosing depression. This is an interesting new trend: blood tests for psychological illnesses. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. After the Genome, the mind is the next great frontier for medicine.

Breakthrough research has found that human immune cells communicate over long distances via microtubulin pathways. This proves that neurons are not the only cells in the body capable of long-distance messaging. It establishes the immune system runs on another, previously unknown, communications network in the body. This is a Big Discovery. Amazing innovations will follow [...]

This article presents some fascinating evidence that nutrition has a direct relationship on behavior, particularly antisocial behavior.

I just read that a Japanese team is actually developing technology to store data in human fingernails. I proposed this concept on this blog last year in this  post.   That may qualify as prior art. I wonder if they are going to try to patent this? Not that I mind, I think it’s a great [...]

A cutting-edge research program is injecting human brain cells into monkey brains, to investigate whether this causes their brains to become more "human." This poses a potential ethical challenge: If the monkeys do become more human, would they be considered "human subjects" and be protected by ethical guidelines governing research onto humans? At which point [...]

Alex is a very smart parrot indeed. To the surprise of researchers, he understands the concept of zero, something which human children don’t grasp until they are 2 or 3 years old. Read more about Alex here.

Although it has always seemed obvious to me that animals have emotions and complex personalities, it’s taken the scientific community a long time to reach that conclusion. This article describes new findings in the field of animal behavior which indicate that not only do animals have emotions, but they also have a level of ethics, [...]

Several recent articles discuss the discovery of insects that clone themselves: The ant Wasmannia Auropunctata, which is native to Central and South America but has spread into the US and beyond, has opted for a unique stand-off in the battle of the sexes. Both queens and males reproduce by making genetically identical copies of themselves [...]

Fascinating article about research which has successfully extracted video from monitoring cat neurons. They have actually reconstructed what the cat actually saw from its neural signals. This opens the door to recording our day-to-day perceptions (lifelogs) and perhaps even to recording our dreams. And of course there might be options for playback as well. This [...]

A new technique has been successfully tested which appears to be able to bring dogs back to life after 3 hours of being clinically dead. This research may hold promise not only for saving lives in cases where clinical death happens before surgery can be performed or completed, but also perhaps for preserving and later [...]

In an amazing new research finding, it turns out that a substantial amount of the so-called "junk DNA" in humans and other vertebrates is the same and has remained unchanged for 600 to 700 million years. Not only that but it turns out that at least some of the base pairs in this set have [...]

In a very interesting new finding, researchers have discovered the people’s brains contain individual neurons, or small groups of neurons, that seem exist only to recognize particular people or concepts. This would imply that there is one neuron, or at least a small group of neurons, in our brains for every unique thing that we [...]

I read the an article today about how Brazil is gradually losing the fight to save the Amazon. The worlds’ rainforests are a global resource — not only are they directly important to the air we all breathe, they also harbor a huge, still untapped, reservoir of species diversity which could be of profound importance [...]

A group of researchers working at the Human Genome Project will be announcing soon that they made an astonishing scientific discovery: They believe so-called non-coding sequences (97%) in human DNA is no less than genetic code of an unknown extraterrestrial life form. The above excerpt is from an article that has to be one of [...]

A modified form of salt water has an ion imbalance that kills viruses, bacteria and other single-celled organisms. It also speeds burn and wound healing dramatically. Best of all, it’s safe if ingested (and has no calories!). Meanwhile, researchers continue to discover that germs are the cause of previously misunderstood diseases, such as many cancers.

Here is a thought-provoking article that discusses several possible directions for the future evoloution of the human species. It includes comments by Richard Dawkins, as well as several scenarios with pictures of what humans might look like in the distant future.

A number of readers sent me links this week about the new Sony patent for ultrasonic neural stimulation.  It is definitely interesting and could represent a useful new approach to non-invasive brainstate manipulation. However, it is by no means anywhere near being useful for entertainment, virtual reality, or mind control. Our understanding of how the [...]

Researchers have finally found intact soft tissue from a T. Rex dinosaur. They are now working to examine it and hopefully isolate DNA from it. Next step: cloning. How long before we have our own pet dino’s, or perhaps humongous dino-burgers from free range T. Rex ranches?

Here is an article written by an MD about what the coming H5N1 flu pandemic will be like, based on historical records of the 1918 flu pandemic. Scary reading.

In a worrying development, part of a mutated human influenza virus related to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was found in a virus in pigs in South Korea. The question is, how did this happen and what does it indicate? It couldn’t have taken place naturally and may be evidence of the early-stages of a  [...]

Here is an interesting article, written by a chess grandmaster, on how to trade information with alien civilizations, assuming they are ever contacted. The article proposes that at interstellar distances, the only realistic form of trade would be a trade in information — such as technology and scientific knowledge. He suggests that the best way [...]

Many years ago I spoke with Will Wright — one of the most interesting visionaries I’ve met (and who happens to be the creator of Sim City) about his dream of a universe game — one in which the player could evolve life from the simple cellular level all the way up through galactic scale [...]

A new study claims that life on earth emerges and is wiped out in 62 million year cycles. The dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago. That implies we are 3 million years overdue for a mass-extinction cycle. Or maybe we’re 3 million years into one? Data indicates that species are presently going extinct at an [...]

MIT neuroscientist, Guosong Liu, has found that human neurons compute in trinary, using signals that are the equivalents of -1, 0 and 1. By contrast, all computers compute in binary, using just 0 and 1. Because the units of trinary computation can in some cases be additive (e.g. 1+1=2) or can "cancel out" (e.g. -1 [...]

A new study has found that exposure to even low levels of second-hand smoke at home had a significant negative impact on children’s reading and math performance at school.

The New York Times has published a wonderful and fascinating set of mini-essays by leading scientists about their beliefs in the unknkown and unexplained — from consciousness, to God, to life on other worlds, and the existence of true love.  There are some terrific thoughts in it — one of thoses rare articles that breaks [...]

I found this delightful series of drawings of the skeletons of popular cartoon characters at The Unreasonable Man, a blog I read. Very smart, take a look!

A new study has found that particular types of dreams take place during different phases of sleep, lending credence to the theory that dreams are not random.

New research has found that people select mates by smell. People fall into distinct smell-types that appear to be directly related to corresponding types of immune systems. The study found that members of couples tended to NOT be of the same smell-type and thus also to not have the same types of immunities; perhaps because [...]

This is an interesting article that points out some facts and unanswered questions about the safety of Splenda, an artificial sweetener that has been gaining in popularity since 2000.