A terrifying robot shows you the emotions slime mold can't express

Do you imagine a robot is able to smile or cry? The question may be the expectation of scientists. However, a computing scientist show his trial of this.

Slime mold can already behave in ways that are surprisingly intelligent, but what if it smiled like us and cried like us — or, at least, like a horrifying facsimile of us? An installation at London's Living Machines conference provides a fascinating, disturbing answer. As reported by New Scientist, computing researcher Ella Gale has created a link between slime mold "emotions" and a humanoid face. Gale let slime mold ooze across an environment full of both food and electrodes. The electrodes captured signals as the mold either headed towards food or shied away from light, producing a log of how the loosely affiliated cells communicate with each other. Since slime mold possesses a kind of decentralized, low-level intelligence — a mass of mold can even form memories — that's not too far from studying the workings of a simple brain.

Gale turned her electrical signals into sound, and with the help of her colleagues, she split the recordings into different sections based on what the mold was doing and how strong the related signals were. Then, she gave various reactions labels: mold heading towards food could be experiencing "joy," while a highly agitated response to light could be "anger." As a last step, she set a robotic head to display these emotions as the recording was played.

It's not really clear that this would let anyone actually see how slime mold is feeling in real time, though Gale has done similar previous work. After all, recording a session of slime mold movement won't necessarily produce anything you could tie to a single action. And even if it did, saying a slime mold is "happy" obviously doesn't mean it feels anything of the sort. However, this mad artistic science does turn our abstract understanding of slime mold as intelligent into something much more personal. It also manages to evoke some of the most primal terrors lurking in the heart of man: welcome to your new nightmare, full of slimy doppelgängers.

From the Verge

The Importance of Humor Research

Humor is as old as humanity. Seeing humor as a kind of psychological action, humor is a very common and frequent event. And considering that chimps and other primates laugh, humor has likely been around even longer than that. In comparison, psychological research on humor is just getting cracking.

Previously some scientists tried to look into it, but they didn’t have the scientific tool to get the job done. Martin Seligman, the father of the positive psychology movement even deems a good sense of humor to be one of 24 characteristics associated with well-being, yet the hugely influential field of happiness research has largely ignored the topic.

By examining humor's antecedents, we will also better understand (and harness) humor's many benefits.

But humor has physical benefits, too. Laughter - especially a hearty laugh - has been shown to benefit your circulation, lungs and muscles (especially those around the belly area). Humor also helps people deal with pain and physical adversity. Hollywood even made a movie, Patch Adams, about the benefits of humor in clinical settings.

Humor appears to help people's psychological and physical well-being - for example, helping folks cope with stress and adversity. Humor even seems to help people grieve: Dacher Keltner and colleagues found that people who spontaneously experienced amusement and laughter when discussing a deceased spouse showed better emotional adjustment in the years following the spouse's death.

New way to treat anxiety

Scientist from Vanderbilt University found that chemically modified inhibitors of the COX-2 enzyme relieve anxiety behavoirs in mice by activation natural “endocannobinoids” without gastrointestinal side effects.

Endocannabinoids are natural signaling molecules that activate cannabinoid receptors in the brain, the same receptors turned on by the active ingredient in marijuana.

These receptors are also found in the gastrointestinal system and elsewhere in the body, and there is evidence that they play a role in wide range of physiological and pathological processes, in addition to modulating stress and anxiety.

If the “substrate-selective” COX-2 inhibitors developed at Vanderbilt also work in humans without side effects, they could represent a new approach to treating mood and anxiety disorders, the researchers conclude in a paper to be posted online Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Clinical trials of some of these potential drugs could begin in the next several years, said Lawrence Marnett, Ph.D., director of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology and the paper’s co-senior author with Sachin Patel, M.D., Ph.D.

The Vanderbilt scientists are pursuing other potential applications of activating endocannabinoids by substrate-selective COX-2 inhibition, including relieving pain, treating movement disorders, and possibly preventing colon cancer.

“The door is really wide open,” said Patel, assistant professor of Psychiatry and of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics. “We’ve just scratched the surface.”

Aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) relieve pain and inflammation by blocking either or both of the cyclooxygenase (COX) enzymes, which produce pro-inflammatory prostaglandins.

It has been known for several years that COX-2 inhibition also activates endocannabinoids.

Because the “substrate selective” inhibitors developed at Vanderbilt increase endocannabinoid levels in the mouse without blocking prostaglandin production, “we think (they) will not have the gastrointestinal and possibly cardiovascular side effects that other NSAIDs do,” said Marnett, University Professor and Mary Geddes Stahlman Professor of Cancer Research.

“We thought we knew everything there was to know about (COX-2 inhibitors) until about five years ago when we discovered the substrate selective inhibition,” he added. The approach used by the Vanderbilt team “is a really powerful way to help design the next generation of drugs.”

via my science academy

Camping could help your sleeping

In the modern world, efficiency and competitiveness becoming first tune of our life, many have sleeping trouble.Researchers suggest a camp outdoors. A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, shows that a week of camping may reset the body's biological clock, allowing it to fall asleep easier at night.

Previous studies have shown that nighttime exposure to the light from TV, computers, tablets, even the tiny blinking light on cell phone chargers can reduce melatonin levels, which can cause sleep disturbances. Kenneth Wright, lead author of the study, published in Current Biology, thought that by increasing a person's exposure to natural light by letting them go camping (and taking away all their gadgets), they would naturally fall into a more "natural" sleep cycle that closer corresponded with sunrise and sunset.

It worked: During the first few days of camping, test subjects tended to fall asleep around midnight and woke up around 8 AM. A week later, most people were falling asleep by 10 PM and waking up at 6 AM. Subjects reported feeling more awake and alert during the morning, which he says is more conducive to a standard 9-5 job schedule. Over the course of the study, participants were exposed to four times more natural light than they were while going about their normal lives.

"We were interested in determining how much our exposure to light has changed and how modern electrical lighting patterns have altered the timing of our internal clock," Wright said. "If people spend more time indoors shielded from natural light, this will likely contribute to later bed and wake times."

While it's not easy for everyone to disconnect for a week (or to stay out in the wilderness for that amount of time), Wright says that the key to the study was the exposure to natural light, not the actual act of camping. That means that forcing yourself to get out of bed and outside as early as you can in the morning might eventually lead to shifts in your biological clock.

"We used camping to ask a question about how much modern electrical lighting patterns have influenced the timing of our internal clock," he said. "One way to shift the internal clock earlier and achieve earlier bed and wake times is to increase the time you spend outside in the morning and also to reduce your exposure to electrical lighting at night."

That, unfortunately, means you probably shouldn't be scanning through Motherboard articles when you can't sleep. Save that for when you're at the office.

Oalib via Motherboard

What does your handwriting say about you?

Recently the National Pen Company in the U.S announced their research about handwriting suggesting personal personalities and creates graphic references for the personal traits links to handwriting.

People with small handwriting tend to be shy, studious and meticulous, whereas outgoing people who love attention will have larger handwriting.
People with small handwriting tend to be shy, studious and meticulous, whereas outgoing people who love attention will have larger handwriting.

The type of looping created by the letters 'l' and 'e' can suggest a person's nature, for example, wide loops means someone is relaxed and spontaneous as well as open minded. People who write narrow loops tend to be skeptical of others and may restrict themselves from certain activities, which causes feelings of tension

If the dot of a letter is situated high above the base it suggests the writer has a great imagination. If the dot is close to the base, they are organised and empathetic. Procrastinators tend to dot their 'i's and 'j's to the left of the base letter, while child-like personality types will draw their dots as circles Long crosses on 't's suggests someone who is determined and enthusiastic, but also stubborn. Short crosses tend to be written by someone who is lazy.

Is Einstein’s speed limit theory right?

In the past 100 years, Albert Einstein’s assertion that there’s an ultimate speed limit – the speed of light – is widely accept and withstood countless tests. But recently some argue that that is not absolutely right. Postdoc Michael Hohensee and graduate student Nathan Leefer from University of California, Berkeley again cheched whether some particles break this law.

The team’s first attempt to test this fundamental tenet of the special theory of relativity demonstrated once again that Einstein was right, but Leefer and Hohensee are improving the experiment to push the theory’s limits even farther – and perhaps turn up a discrepancy that could help physicists fix holes in today’s main theories of the universe.

The team’s first attempt to test this fundamental tenet of the special theory of relativity demonstrated once again that Einstein was right, but Leefer and Hohensee are improving the experiment to push the theory’s limits even farther – and perhaps turn up a discrepancy that could help physicists fix holes in today’s main theories of the universe.

Hohensee, Leefer and Dmitry Budker, a UC Berkeley professor of physics, conducted the test using a new technique involving two isotopes of the element dysprosium. By measuring the energy required to change the velocity of electrons as they jumped from one atomic orbital to another while Earth rotated over a 12-hour period, they determined that the maximum speed of an electron – in theory, the speed of light, about 300 million meters per second – is the same in all directions to within 17 nanometers per second. Their measurements were 10 times more precise than previous attempts to measure the maximum speed of electrons.

The UC Berkeley physicists and colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who provided crucial theoretical calculations, published their results this week in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Oalib

Solitary confinement causes psychology problems

Prisoners in solitary confinement almost spend all day in solitary units with no contacting with others. Because solitary confinement is wildly adopted at the discretion of prison administration, many inmates spend years, even decades, cut off from any real social interaction.

Inmates who are sent to solitary are not all the “worst of the worst”, like rapists and murders who continue their violent way even behind bars. But in fact many are placed in solitary for nonviolent offenses, and some are not even criminals, having been arrested on immigration charges. Others are thrown into isolation cells “for their own protection” because they are homosexual or transgendered or have been raped by other inmates.

Whatever the reasons, such extreme isolation and sensory deprivation can take a severe, sometimes permanent, toll on emotional and mental health. Researchers have found that prisoners in solitary quickly become withdrawn, hypersensitive to sights and sounds, paranoid, and more prone to violence and hallucinations. Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has documented several cases of individuals with no prior history of mental illness who nonetheless developed paranoid psychosis requiring medical treatment after prolonged solitary confinement. As damaging as the consequences are for otherwise healthy adults, they are even worse for adolescents, whose brains are still in their final stages of development, and the mentally ill, who already struggle to maintain a solid grasp on reality. About half of all prison suicides occur in isolation cells.