The images come from NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, which is set to smash the longevity record for a Martian probe

Genius penetrates this world well and a humbled genius penetrates even better. Professor Jim Al-Khalili programme on BBC4 "Science and Islam" was an eye-opener for me, especially the details of the life of ibn al-Haytham, a medieval genius. The opening sentence of this post alludes to the fact that he thought he could tame the river Nile and realized shortly that he could not. This got him into trouble with the king (to whom he had promised a tamer Nile) who ordered his death. Ibn al-Haytham had to feign madness to escape death. Much humbled, al-Haytham dedicated his life to scientific pursuits and developed the most remarkable strategy we have for muddling-through this world: The Scientific Method.

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Sunday’s Post:

Once again, in the midst of the cacophony, calls abound for a national “dialogue” on race. Yet our nation cannot muster the patience or stamina to sustain such a discussion beyond a single news cycle. … At the barest suggestion of race, we line up at opposite corners and start hurling accusations. …

Racial inequality is perpetuated less by individuals than by structural racism and implicit bias. Evidence of structural inequality is everywhere: in the grossly disproportionate numbers of young black men and women in prison; in the color of students shunted into remedial and special education tracks. … It is evident, too, in the history of blatant discrimination against black farmers practiced by the Agricultural Department.

But that does not make doctors, nurses, police officers, judges, teachers, lawyers, city planners, admission officers or others prejudiced. Most are well-intentioned professionals who believe themselves to be free of racial bias. … Implicit bias is a reality we must confront far more openly. A growing mass of compelling research reveals the unconscious racial stereotypes many of us harbor that affect our decisions. … White and black test-takers match black faces more quickly than white ones with words representing violent concepts. … The more stereotypically black the features of a criminal defendant, the harsher the sentence he or she is likely to receive. Implicit bias has been shown to factor into hiring decisions and into the quality of health care that individuals receive. …

The good news is that structures can be dismantled and replaced and unconscious biases can be transformed. … First, though, they must be acknowledged. … Our nation has to stop denying the complexity of our racial attitudes, history and progress. Let’s tone down the rhetoric on all sides.

Many folks reasonably suspect invitations to discuss race are traps – it seems hard to say much on race without being accused of racism, racial insensitivity, etc. But let me cautiously weigh in anyway.

Yes, we have unconscious expectations about others, yes those depend in part on race, and yes those expectations are a mixture of info and error.  Some unconscious race-based expectations are a reasonable summary of actual common differences between races, while others are mistaken, with expectations that are too favorable or unfavorable for particular races.

I see two basic approaches to reducing racial expectation errors:

1. Rely on, and perhaps improve, local incentives for individual decision makers to identify and correct their own errors, and to select themselves into decision places well matched to their abilities to avoid such errors.
2. Have a broad conversation on the rough sorts of racial errors we expect to be common, then authorize officials to use discretion to pick regulations to reduce such errors at an acceptable cost, relative to other considerations.

One big problem with the regulation approach is that giving regulators discretion can make things worse, as well as better. Two examples above, of racial errors by sentencing judges and by the Ag Dept, seem examples where regulator discretion went quite wrong. Since medicine is heavily regulated to preserve doctor discretion, racial treatment errors by doctors has a similar cause.

Unfortunately, judges, ag dept officials, and regulated doctors have only weak incentives to overcome their racial biases. Sure they might fear that a broad conversation will arise and create a consensus among voters both that such folks had been racially biased, and that they should be punished strongly for it. But really, how likely is that?

In contrast, employers choosing who to hire can have much stronger incentives. If a labor market isn’t too heavily mis-regulated, any employer could profit substantially by preferring to hire folks that other employers unfairly neglect. If ordinary hiring specialists are too busy or distracted to notice such opportunities, hiring consultants can specialize in charging to identify such opportunities.

Yes, such incentives don’t prevent all employer racial bias, and yes thoughtful hard-working well-meaning regulators (including politicians and civil servants) can and have developed labor regulations that could reduce such bias. The problem is, when you empower regulators to fix such problems, you empower many other kinds of regulators as well, also including lazy stupid racially-biased ones. And you give all these regulators only weak incentives to overcome their biases.

For problems about which many people feel strongly, it is indeed a feels-right forager way to seek a communal conversation to identify new communally-enforced social norms to solve the problem. In large modern societies, however, this urge to solve problems by national conversations and laws seems largely dysfunctional.

Much better, when possible, is to rely on local incentives.  For example, if employer incentives to overcome racial biases seem currently too weak, let’s up the ante by enabling corporate raiders, proxy access, etc.  Forms of futarchy can give participants strong incentives to overcome racial biases regarding policy recommendations.  There is plenty we can do, if people really want to overcome racial biases.

New technology could allow paralyzed patients to type and move a wheelchair by sniffing

The organizers of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony solved an ancient problem: How to keep speeches from droning on and on… The solution, called “Miss Sweetie Poo”, is an 8-year-old girl who tells long-winded speakers to “Please stop. I’m bored. Please stop. I’m bored…” Here are Miss Sweetie Poo highlights from several Ig ceremonies.

This is the new episode — #129, “The Best of Miss Sweetie Poo” — of the Improbable Research TV series.

To see this episode, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel).

When two people talk, similar areas of their brain activate

Here is part of a picture some of my friends posted from a recent high school reunion.

It may be hard to tell, but this is part of a picture of 7 females all wearing black. I just wanted to show you that they were indeed wearing black without giving away anymore details. If you are one of these people and you want your whole picture included, I will be happy to make that change and include your face.

Anyway, my first comment was: "Wow, everyone is wearing black. Was this a planned event or was black part of the dress code?" The response was that it was just pure chance that all the women were wearing black. ALL CHANCE? All chance you say? That seems unlikely - but let me crunch some numbers just to be sure.

Assumptions

• As my friend claimed - there was no plan. This suggests that she believes each woman independently decided to wear a black dress. I am glad, this makes things easier.
• Here is the big one. If a woman was picking out an outfit to wear, what is the chance that outfit would be black? I originally guessed 1 out of 4, but maybe that should be 1 out of 3. I am going with 1 out of 3 because black is a slimming color and black is the new black.

Calculation

If the chance of one woman picking black is 1 out of 3. The probability of 2 women independently picking black would be:

And this expands to n women as:

Back to seven women. The probability of seven women independently randomly choosing to wear black would be:

Right there you have your answer. If the women are independently choosing their outfits and if they choose black 1 out of 3 times then there is a very small probability that they all chose black. It could happen, but it is not very likely.

Simulation

I can't stop there, I just can't. How about I simulate 7 women meeting at a party. For simplicity, let me say that a woman randomly chooses 1 of three colors: black (B), color A (A), or color B (B). I know it is actually more complicated than that. It is probably something like 9 choices of outfit, but 3 are black - but the result is the same.

Suppose I went to 20 meetings where these 7 women randomly chose a dress. I then count how many were wearing black. Here is what that might look like:

These 20 random meetings, not once were all the women wearing black (not even 5 or 6 of the 7 wearing black). (note that if I re-run the simulation, it is possible to see this happen once or even more than once). What if I went to 500 events?

Again, not all were wearing black. Only 2 out of 500 had 6 out of 7 wearing black. Ok. One more graph. How about 5000 events?

I know you can't tell, but actually 2 of these 5000 events had all seven women wearing black (it is just such a small number compared to the other possibilities). Boy, I sure would be tired going to that many events.

The next step

Probably the next step would be to go out to some events and count how many of the women are wearing black. I am not going to do this.

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New technique for deleting cells allows researchers to pin down their function

When two people experience a deep connection, they’re informally described as being on the same wavelength. There may be neurological truth to that.

Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed their neural activity synchronizing during storytelling. The stronger their reported connection, the closer the coupling.

The experiment was the first to use fMRI, which measures blood flow changes in the brain, on two people as they talked. Different brain regions have been linked to both speaking and listening, but “the ongoing interaction between the two systems during everyday communication remains largely unknown,” wrote Princeton University neuroscientists Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson in the July 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronization is a result of that connection, not its cause. And while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear. But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

The researchers didn’t test brain synchronization during phone calls or video conferencing, but Hasson speculates that “coupling would be stronger face-to-face.” He also thinks dialogue will produce especially strong forms of synchronization, and plans to run scans of people engaged in deep conversation, rather than telling or listening to long stories.

“But first, we’ll look at cases where there’s a failure to communicate,” said Hasson.

Image: Overlap between neural activation in speaker and listener./PNAS.

See Also:

• Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
• Brain Scan Lie-Detection Deemed Far From Ready for Courtroom
• Twitter Telepathy: Researchers Turn Thoughts Into Tweets
• Nun Brains Show Language Skills Predict Future Alzheimer’s Risk
• Roots of Language Run Deeper Than Speech

Citation: “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication.” By Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, Uri Hasson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 29, July 27, 2010.

Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecological tipping points.

NASA didn't plan it this way, but earlier this month a co-investigator on the...

Physicists will soon have to decide what kind of particle smasher they want built after the LHC – they discussed it at a major conference today

First results from the LHC at CERN are being revealed at ICHEP, the world's largest international conference on particle physics, which has attracted more than 1000 participants to its venue in Paris. The spokespersons of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb - are today presenting measurements from the first three months of successful LHC operation at 3.5 TeV per beam, an energy three and a half times higher than previously achieved at a particle accelerator.

Mathematicians have now figured out the dynamics that drive locusts across the landscape, devastating everything underfoot — and the math says people will never be able to predict where the little buggers will go.

The new analysis, reported in an upcoming issue of Physical Review E, suggests that random factors accumulate and influence how swarming locusts collectively decide to change course.

“These swarms are driven by intrinsic dynamics,” says team member Iain Couzin, a biologist at Princeton University. “In all practical terms, predicting when a swarm is going to change direction is going to be impossible.”

Still, others say the information may one day allow researchers to better inform locust-control efforts — for instance, by suggesting the best times and places to apply insecticide ahead of an approaching swarm.

Desert locusts, Schistocerca gregaria, normally live in arid parts of Africa and Asia but can explode over millions of square kilometers during plagues, as happened during the late 1980s. Researchers understand much of the basic biology behind locust swarms — even how the insects change color as they mass together — but the physics describing their collective behavior has been something of a mystery.

That began to change a few years ago, when an interdisciplinary group of mathematicians, biologists and others were inspired to look at the basic physics of locust swarming. By putting more and more locusts into a ring-shaped arena 80 centimeters in diameter, the team watched as, at a critical density, the locusts switched from wandering around on their own to behaving as a group.

In new work, Carlos Escudero of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid looked further at the mathematics underlying this change in behavior. From watching locusts in the arena he and his colleagues came up with an equation, called a Fokker-Planck equation, that describes how the density of particles (or in this case, insects) changes over time.

Further analysis showed that a number of random factors influence when the insects decide to change direction. Mathematically, the change in the locusts’ direction is similar to switches in magnetic properties that occur among clumps of magnetic particles at high temperatures, Escudero says. In both cases, random influences accumulate until suddenly the whole system changes its behavior.

“It’s impossible to know when the next switch will happen,” Escudero says. “Still, we have a little bit more understanding on how these perturbations are produced, and we hope that in the long run we can apply this practically.”

Jerome Buhl, a biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, notes that swarming locusts typically start their morning in a dense clump and spread out over the course of the day. The best time to target spraying, he says, might therefore be right after the insects start marching, because over time their behavior will become less predictable.

“What we need to do now is to work out the maths behind this,” Buhl says, “and we’ll be able to determine which way to lay the barriers ahead of a band to more likely be optimal, potentially saving on the amount of insecticide used and minimizing the impact of control.”

Buhl and other researchers are gearing up for an imminent expected plague of a different locust species in Australia. The team plans to glue tiny reflectors to locusts, then fly unmanned aerial vehicles over the swarms to track the behavior of individuals within the group.

Images: A locust swarm in Eilat, Israel./Flickr/antichrist.

See Also:

• High-Speed Video of Locusts Could Help Make Better Flying Robots
• High-Speed Video Shows How Flies Change Direction So Quickly
• Pigeon Flocks Let the Best Bird Lead
• Amazing Starling Flocks Are Flying Avalanches
• Jellyfish Are the Dark Energy of the Oceans

All today's stories on NewScientist.com, including: the great social network experiment, sneaky dogs that steal food and belly-flopping frogs

If you spend your time online rather than watching TV, your grey matter can make the world a better place, says Clay Shirky

Spend enough time with your eyes glued to a microscope and you will see some beautiful structure, cell or circuit – here are a few of our favourites

This entire post is a spoiler. Stop reading if you have not seen Inception, because 1) I will reveal major plot points and 2) It will make no sense.

The literary critic Frank Kermode famously argued that all successful works of art have the ability to inspire multiple interpretations. We read the classics, he said, because we believe they say more than the author meant. In other words, it is the ambiguity of art  - this ability to inspire arguments and blog posts – that makes it so interesting.

Inception, of course, is all about the ambiguity. (Those who parse the wobbles of the spinning top in the final scene have missed the entire point of the scene.) This doesn’t mean the movie is a masterpiece – I personally thought it was a smart summer blockbuster but no Dark Knight. That said, I found this interpretation, by Devin Farci, to be mostly convincing:

Every single moment of Inception is a dream. I think that in a couple of years this will become the accepted reading of the film, and differing interpretations will have to be skillfully argued to be even remotely considered. The film makes this clear, and it never holds back the truth from audiences. Some find this idea to be narratively repugnant, since they think that a movie where everything is a dream is a movie without stakes, a movie where the audience is wasting their time.

Except that this is exactly what Nolan is arguing against. The film is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director works, and what he’s ultimately saying is that the catharsis found in a dream is as real as the catharsis found in a movie is as real as the catharsis found in life. Inception is about making movies, and cinema is the shared dream that truly interests the director.

I believe that Inception is a dream to the point where even the dream-sharing stuff is a dream. Dom Cobb isn’t an extractor. He can’t go into other people’s dreams. He isn’t on the run from the Cobol Corporation. At one point he tells himself this, through the voice of Mal, who is a projection of his own subconscious. She asks him how real he thinks his world is, where he’s being chased across the globe by faceless corporate goons.

What I like about this interpretation of Inception is that it also makes neurological sense. From the perspective of your brain, dreaming and movie-watching are strangely parallel experiences. In fact, one could argue that sitting in a darkened theater and staring at a thriller is the closest one can get to REM sleep with open eyes. Consider this study, led by Uri Hasson and Rafael Malach at Hebrew University. The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie (“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly”) and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. The scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is “Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision”.) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here’s the nut graf from the paper:

This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains “tick together” in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.

But it’s also worth pointing out which brain areas didn’t “tick together” in the movie theater. The most notable of these “non-synchronous” regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we’re engaged in intense “sensorimotor processing” – and nothing is more intense for the senses than a big moving image and Dolby surround sound – we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such “inactivation” allows us to lose ourself in the movie:

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ”losing yourself in the act” receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation. (This is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in a wide range of “limbic” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. This is why even the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens makes no sense.

I’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don’t Cobb’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we “know” it’s just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes and the excited visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don’t question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or the shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time together. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an idea. But this Dom Cobb – we’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn’t need a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a big screen.

Image: Screengrab from the movie trailer.

(PhysOrg.com) -- New constraints on the elusive Higgs particle are more stringent than ever before. Scientists of the CDF and DZero collider experiments at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab revealed their latest Higgs search results today at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, held in Paris from July 22-28. Their results rule out a significant fraction of the allowed mass range established by earlier experiments.

The subject of the "spin" of the electron comes up again and again, so as pointed out in a comment, I really ought to do a post explaining what it is and how it works. As a bonus, this gives me the opportunity to do the dorkiest thing anyone has ever done with a cute-toddler video, namely this one:

(That's an early version of SteelyKid's new favorite game. I'll put a clip of the final version of the game at the end of this post.)

So, electron spin. Electrons, and all other fundamental particles, have a property known as "spin." This is an intrinsic angular momentum associated with the particles, as if they were little spinning balls of charge. I say "as if" there, because they are not literally spinning balls of charge, because the spin angular momentum associated with fundamental particles has some properties that are very strange, and completely unlike the behavior of spinning basketballs, or gyroscopes, or figure skaters, or whatever your favorite example of a system with angular momentum is.

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Higgs likely lighter, and more elusive