My friend Gabe pointed me to this talk by Jill Bolte Taylor during TED talks. Bolte, a neuroanatomist who one morning found out she was having a massive stroke, tells how she felt her consciousness, language and other brain functions dissipate minute after minute. An impressive insight account by a scientist of the way we relate to our surroundings and what makes us what we are. The talk bounces between the scientific and the mystical…
View the talk here.
It seems like scientists at U Penn have a bit too much free time on their hands. They set up what they called a ‘Flypub’, and got the fruit flies drunk to see how alcohol (or its fumes in this case) loosened their sexual inhibitions. The male flies started hitting on each other and forming little conga lines after they were completely wasted. Some were passed out on the curb, others were zigzagging, just like in the pubs on the upper east side… As if this wasn’t enough embarrassment for the flies, they then proceeded to film it all and put it on YouTube for the whole world to see.
Read the article in New Scientist here.
Take a look at an impressive zoomed image after the jump.
A group of Japanese researchers has published the results of their recent cognitive experiments involving chimps and humans in which, both were shown sequence of numbers on a screen to then be recalled. The chimps outperformed the university students…
No one can imagine that chimpanzees – young chimpanzees at the age of five – have a better performance in a memory task than humans.
“Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection – better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”
Dr Matsuzawa and colleagues tested three pairs of mother and baby chimpanzees against university students in a memory task involving numbers…The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response. The BBC article reads.
Maybe we should send them to school instead and let us debug ourselves all day.
Read the full article here.