The Brain on Words

FULL NEWSHOUR ARTICLE HERE

It’s like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.

Hear a word relating to family, loss, or the passing of time — such as “wife,” “month,” or “remarried”— and a ridge called the right angular gyrus may be working overtime. Listening to your contractor talking about the design of your new front porch? Thank a pea-sized spot of brain behind your left ear.

The research on the “brain dictionary” has the hallmarks of a big scientific splash: Published on Wednesday in Nature, it’s accompanied by both a video and an interactive website where you can click your way from brain region to brain region, seeing what kinds of words are processed in each.

Yet neuroscientists aren’t uniformly impressed.

“This is technically very savvy,” said David Poeppel, a neuroscientist who studies language at New York University and who was not involved in the study. But he invoked an old metaphor to explain why he isn’t convinced by the analysis: He compared it to establishing a theory of how weather works by pointing a video camera out the window for 7 hours.

Indeed, among neuroscientists, the new “comprehensive atlas” of the cerebral cortex is almost as controversial as a historical atlas of the Middle East.

That’s because every word has a constellation of meanings and associations — and it’s hard for scientists to agree about how best to study them in the lab.

GED Biology Introduction: CARBON

FULL BOUNDLESS Article here

Carbon is Important to Life

In its metabolism of food and respiration, an animal consumes glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆), which combines with oxygen (O₂) to produce carbon dioxide (CO₂), water (H₂O), and energy, which is given off as heat. The animal has no need for the carbon dioxide and releases it into the atmosphere. A plant, on the other hand, uses the opposite reaction of an animal through photosynthesis. It intakes carbon dioxide, water, and energy from sunlight to make its own glucose and oxygen gas. The glucose is used for chemical energy, which the plant metabolizes in a similar way to an animal. The plant then emits the remaining oxygen into the environment.

Cells are made of many complex molecules called macromolecules, which include proteins, nucleic acids (RNA and DNA), carbohydrates, and lipids. The macromolecules are a subset of organic molecules (any carbon-containing liquid, solid, or gas) that are especially important for life. The fundamental component for all of these macromolecules is carbon. The carbon atom has unique properties that allow it to form covalent bonds to as many as four different atoms, making this versatile element ideal to serve as the basic structural component, or "backbone," of the macromolecules.

Source: Boundless. “The Chemical Basis for Life.” Boundless Biology. Boundless, 08 Jan. 2016. Retrieved 24 Mar. 2016 from https://www.boundless.com/biology/textbooks/boundless-biology-textbook/the-chemical-foundation-of-life-2/carbon-52/the-chemical-basis-for-life-288-11421/


FULL WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE HERE

Carbon has the ability to form very long chains of interconnecting C-C bonds. This property is called catenation. Carbon-carbon bonds are strong, and stable. This property allows carbon to form an almost infinite number of compounds; in fact, there are more known carbon-containing compounds than all the compounds of the other chemical elements combined except those of hydrogen (because almost all organic compounds contain hydrogen as well).

The simplest form of an organic molecule is the hydrocarbon—a large family of organic molecules that are composed of hydrogen atoms bonded to a chain of carbon atoms. Chain length, side chains and functional groups all affect the properties of organic molecules.

Carbon occurs in all known organic life and is the basis of organic chemistry. When united with hydrogen, it forms various hydrocarbons which are important to industry asrefrigerants, lubricants, solvents, as chemical feedstock for the manufacture of plastics and petrochemicals and as fossil fuels.

When combined with oxygen and hydrogen, carbon can form many groups of important biological compounds includingsugars, lignans, chitins, alcohols, fats, and aromatic esters, carotenoids and terpenes. With nitrogen it forms alkaloids, and with the addition of sulfur also it forms antibiotics, amino acids, and rubber products. With the addition of phosphorus to these other elements, it forms DNA and RNA, the chemical-code carriers of life, and adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the most important energy-transfer molecule in all living cells.

GED Science Lesson: Big Bang and the Multiverse

Full Higher Perspective article

According to researchers: "Dr Ranga-Ram Chary examined the noise and residual signals in the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang (pictured) and found a number of scattered bright spots which he believes may be signals of another universe bumping into our own billions of years ago."

At least that's the tentative conclusion researchers have come to. According to some cosmological theories, collisions of alternative universes should be possible. Theories conclude that our universe is like a bubble among many.

Once a universe begins in a big bang type setting, it never stops expanding. That goes for all the universes. So it makes sense they'd periodically bump into one another. They're all likely in a row, say researchers, vibrating, bouncing around, and rubbing up on each other.

Full Wikipedia article on the Multiverse Theory

Explanation[edit]

The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it, and the relationships among these universes depend upon the specific multiverse hypothesis being considered.

Multiple universes have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, transpersonal psychology, and fiction, particularly in science fiction andfantasy. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called "alternate universes", "quantum universes", "interpenetrating dimensions", "parallel dimensions", "parallel worlds", "alternate realities", "alternate timelines", and "dimensional planes".

The physics community continues to debate the multiverse hypothesis. Prominent physicists disagree about whether the multiverse exists.

Some physicists say the multiverse is not a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry.^[2] Concerns have been raised about whether attempts to exempt the multiverse from experimental verification could erode public confidence in science and ultimately damage the study of fundamental physics.^[3] Some have argued that the multiverse is a philosophical rather than a scientific hypothesis because it cannot be falsified. The ability to disprove a theory by means of scientific experiment has always been part of the accepted scientific method.^[4] Paul Steinhardt has famously argued that no experiment can rule out a theory if the theory provides for all possible outcomes.^[5]

In 2007, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggested that if the multiverse existed, "the hope of finding a rational explanation for the precise values of quark masses and other constants of the standard model that we observe in our Big Bang is doomed, for their values would be an accident of the particular part of the multiverse in which we live."^[6]

GED Science Lesson: Scientists Move Closer to Schizophrenia's Cause

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"Scientists reported on Wednesday that they had taken a significant step toward understanding the cause of schizophrenia, in a landmark study that provides the first rigorously tested insight into the biology behind any common psychiatric disorder.

The researchers pieced together the steps by which genes can increase a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia. That risk, they found, is tied to a natural process called synaptic pruning, in which the brain sheds weak or redundant connections between neurons as it matures. During adolescenceand early adulthood, this activity takes place primarily in the section of the brain where thinking and planning skills are centered, known as the prefrontal cortex. People who carry genes that accelerate or intensify that pruning are at higher risk of developing schizophrenia than those who do not, the new study suggests." 

GED Science Lesson: The scale of the universe

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From Wikipedia

"The observable universe consists of the galaxies and other matter that can, in principle, be observed from Earth at the present time because light and other signals from these objects have had time to reach Earth since the beginning of thecosmological expansion. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is roughly the same in every direction. That is, the observable universe is a spherical volume (a ball) centered on the observer. Every location in the Universe has its own observable universe, which may or may not overlap with the one centered on Earth.

The word observable used in this sense does not depend on whether modern technology actually permits detection ofradiation from an object in this region (or indeed on whether there is any radiation to detect). It simply indicates that it is possible in principle for light or other signals from the object to reach an observer on Earth. In practice, we can see light only from as far back as the time of photon decoupling in the recombination epoch. That is when particles were first able to emit photons that were not quickly re-absorbed by other particles. Before then, the Universe was filled with a plasmathat was opaque to photons."

GED Science Lesson: How Flint's Water Got Poisonous

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The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality failed to ensure the water was treated for its corrosiveness.

The Flint River water turned out to be more corrosive than the water Flint received from Detroit -- so corrosive, in fact, that in October 2014, General Motors opted toquit using it to avoid corroding parts in its engine plant. Corrosiveness is a problem because Flint, like many American cities, has water pipes that are made from lead, which can leach into the water and poison people who drink it. 

Back in 2011, Flint had commissioned an evaluation of Flint River water, the results of which indicated it would need to be treated with phosphates to reduce its corrosiveness. Two years later, according to the Detroit Free Press, a Flint official forwarded that information to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, which is responsible for ensuring that Flint follows the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. But the MDEQ didn't do its job.

As Miguel Del Toral, an expert with the Environmental Protection Agency who was investigating local complaints about the water, explained in a June 2015 memo: "Recent drinking water sample results indicate the presence of high lead results in the drinking water, which is to be expected in a public water system that is not providing corrosion control treatment. The lack of any mitigating treatment for lead is of serious concern for residents that live in homes with lead service lines or partial lead service lines, which are common throughout the City of Flint."

GED Science Lesson: History of Universe compressed on a Calendar

http://futurism.com/images/20678/?src=home