Cultural Synesthesia

An intermingling of the senses creates not just a different way of perceiving the world, but a window into your past, like psychological amber.

My consciousness is a constant stream of color. Whether I’m reading, texting a friend, or doing math homework, every letter or number I see comes swathed in its own characteristic hue. My 7’s are forest green, L’s are orange, and both A’s and 4’s are hot pink.

Growing up, I did not realize my experience was atypical until I read A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass in middle school. The book tells the story of 13-year old Mia Winchell, who experiences synesthesia, a mingling of the senses. Mia involuntarily sees letters, numbers and even sounds in specific colors. The book described my experience perfectly except for one thing – my colors were different. Since then, I’ve wondered what gives every synesthete their own unique associations; why does the K look lavender to me, but blue for someone else? What neural process transforms an impersonal, black T into my vivid, lime green T?

de: Meera Khare and Apoorva Bhandari
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Weightlifting is beneficial before and after the menopause


Credit: María Corte (via Nature)

Loss of muscle mass and a slower metabolism are just some of the physical changes caused by the menopause.

Many women begin experiencing symptoms of the menopause around age 50. As hormones begin to fluctuate and change, women might start experiencing a range of symptoms, such as hot flushes, joint pain, low mood and vaginal dryness. The menopause can also be accompanied by a range of physical changes too – including loss of muscle mass, loss of bone density and a slowed metabolism.

Fortunately, regular exercise – specifically weightlifting – can help mitigate these changes somewhat and improve overall health and wellbeing. Here are just some of the ways weightlifting can be beneficial to women going through the menopause.

de: Athalie Redwood-Brown and Jennifer Wilson
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Color is in the eye, and brain, of the beholder

Care e culoarea ta favorită?

The way we see and describe hues varies widely for many reasons: from our individual eye structure, to how our brain processes images, to what language we speak, or even if we live near a body of water 

What color is a tree, or the sky, or a sunset? At first glance, the answers seem obvious. But it turns out there is plenty of variation in how people see the world — both between individuals and between different cultural groups.

A lot of factors feed into how people perceive and talk about color, from the biology of our eyes to how our brains process that information, to the words our languages use to talk about color categories. There’s plenty of room for differences, all along the way.

de: Nicola Jones
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Psychedelics open a new window on the mechanisms of perception

Creier uman are o tendință spre negativitate și îngrijorare

Some neuroscientists think psychedelic drugs and the hallucinations they induce could help reveal how the brain generates our perceptions of the world around us — and of ourselves.

“Everything became imbued with a sense of vitality and life and vividness. If I picked up a pebble from the beach, it would move. It would glisten and gleam and sparkle and be absolutely captivating,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth. “Somebody looking at me would see me staring at a stone for hours.”

Or what seemed like hours to Seth. A researcher at the UK’s University of Sussex, he studies how the brain helps us perceive the world within and without, and is intrigued by what psychedelics such as LSD can tell us about how the brain creates these perceptions. So a few years ago, he decided to try some, in controlled doses and with trusted people by his side. He had a notebook to keep track of his experiences. “I didn’t write very much in the notebook,” he says, laughing.

de: Anil Ananthaswamy
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Why supernatural beliefs have featured in every society throughout history

Religion is a human universal. For thousands of years, humans have held religious beliefs and participated in religious rituals. Throughout history, every human society has featured some kind of supernatural or religious belief.

Why is religion so prevalent? One reason is that it’s a powerful tool for explanation.

The world is a mysterious place, and was even more mysterious before the rise of modern science. Religion can be a way of making sense of this mystery. This idea dates back to theologians and philosophers such as Henry Drummond and Friedrich Nietzsche, who both supported the “God of the gaps” hypothesis, wherein divine intervention by God is used to explain gaps in scientific knowledge.

de: Joshua Conrad Jackson and Brock Bastian
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

How fast is the Universe really expanding? Multiple views of an exploding star raise new questions

de: Brad E Tucker, Australian National University
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

To understand AI’s problems look at the shortcuts taken to create it

A machine can only “do whatever we know how to order it to perform,” wrote the 19th-century computing pioneer Ada Lovelace. This reassuring statement was made in relation to Charles Babbage’s description of the first mechanical computer.

Lady Lovelace could not have known that in 2016, a program called AlphaGo, designed to play and improve at the board game “Go”, would not only be able to defeat all of its creators, but would do it in ways that they could not explain.

In 2023, the AI chatbot ChatGPT is taking this to another level, holding conversations in multiple languages, solving riddles and even passing legal and medical exams. Our machines are now able to do things that we, their makers, do not know “how to order them to do”.

de: Nello Cristianini, University of Bath
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

In the past every second child died, but the mortality rate has declined to about 0.3% in some countries

The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally. This article asks how we know about the mortality of children in the past and what we can learn from it for our future.

A child dying is one of the most dreadful tragedies one can imagine. We all know that child deaths were more common in the past. But how common? How do we know? And what can we learn from our history?

Archeologists and historians have brought together data from many places and time periods across the world which lets us piece together a picture of our past.

de: Max Roser
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

What is Snake, Russia's most sophisticated cyber espionage tool? How does Snake work and why is it so dangerous?

Like most people I check my emails in the morning, wading through a combination of work requests, spam and news alerts peppering my inbox.

But yesterday brought something different and deeply disturbing. I noticed an alert from the American Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) about some very devious malware that had infected a network of computers.

The malware in question is Snake, a cyber espionage tool deployed by Russia’s Federal Security Service that has been around for about 20 years.

According to CISA, the Snake implant is the “most sophisticated cyber espionage tool designed and used by Center 16 of Russia’s Federal Security Service for long-term intelligence collection on sensitive targets”.

de: Greg Skulmoski, Bond University
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Life of wild animals is probably nicer than you think

If you know anything about the experiences of animals reared in captivity for food, fur or human amusement, you might imagine that the lives of wild animals are idyllic. If nature is conceived as a sort of Garden of Eden then animals which live in it, free of human interference, are presumably living their best possible lives.

Others see life in the wild as far harsher. Nature is “red in tooth and claw” as poet Alfred Tennyson once put it. According to this view, the average life of a wild animal can be best understood as a desperate search for food and shelter, enduring pain and sickness and burdened with the ever-present prospect of a savage death.

This latter view is arguably dominant among those who ponder questions of wild animal ethics and welfare. Scholars like Yew-Kwang Ng and Oscar Horta have aimed in part to debunk the view that wild animals have it pretty good by evoking the prevalence of vicious predators and other sources of harm. Yet this picture may be just as inaccurate.

In our recent paper, we argued that the real experience of wild animal life most likely sits somewhere between these two extremes – though it’s probably a lot better than many researchers think.

The popular view of wild animals being consumed by suffering has been influenced by a preoccupation with their experiences at the time of their deaths. Too little attention has been paid to the range of positive experiences available to wild animals throughout their lives.

de: Heather Browning, University of Southampton and Walter Veit, University of Bristol
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

How does a volcano work? What causes a volcano to erupt?

An aerial view of the Mauna Loa volcano, which erupted on the island of Hawaii in December 2022. Andrew Richard Hara/Getty Images News

Rachel Beane, Bowdoin College

On Nov. 27, 2022, Mauna Loa – the world’s largest active volcano – erupted on the island of Hawaii. For days, fountains of lava, boiling at more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius), spewed upward and flowed down the mountain’s sides.

For tens of millions of people around the world, the videos were a mesmerizing sight. Then, a few weeks later, the eruption ended. Fortunately, there were no known deaths, and no major property damage.

de: Rachel Beane
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Six parts of your car that gather data on you

New Africa/Shutterstock

Rachael Medhurst, University of South Wales

You can tell a lot about someone from the car they drive. The data that many vehicles now collect can reveal the patterns of our daily lives and provide insights into our behaviour, actions and even our state of mind.

Vehicle forensics is a type of digital forensic science that focuses on the identification, acquisition and analysis of data which has been stored by cars, vans and lorries.

Originally, vehicle forensics mainly related to the external identification of stolen cars or tax and MOT violations by the use of the ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system in the UK. The system was invented during the 1970s but did not become widely used by the police until the late 1990s. ANPR works by scanning number plates and checking them against a database of vehicles of interest.

de: Rachael Medhurst
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Limits to computing. Why even in the age of AI, some problems are just too difficult

Jie Wang, UMass Lowell

Empowered by artificial intelligence technologies, computers today can engage in convincing conversations with people, compose songs, paint paintings, play chess and go, and diagnose diseases, to name just a few examples of their technological prowess.

These successes could be taken to indicate that computation has no limits. To see if that’s the case, it’s important to understand what makes a computer powerful.

There are two aspects to a computer’s power: the number of operations its hardware can execute per second and the efficiency of the algorithms it runs. The hardware speed is limited by the laws of physics. Algorithms – basically sets of instructions – are written by humans and translated into a sequence of operations that computer hardware can execute. Even if a computer’s speed could reach the physical limit, computational hurdles remain due to the limits of algorithms.

de: Jie Wang
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

How scientists determine whether a chemical is carcinogenic

Brad Reisfeld, Colorado State University

People are exposed to numerous chemicals throughout their lifetimes. These chemicals can be from the air, foods, personal care items, household products and medications. Unfortunately, exposure to certain chemicals can cause harmful health effects, including cancer. Substances that cause cancer are called carcinogens. Familiar examples include tobacco smoke, radon, asbestos and diesel engine exhaust.

To protect the health of the public, national and international health agencies evaluate many new and existing chemicals to determine if they are likely to be carcinogens in a process called cancer hazard identification. If agencies judge the chemicals to be carcinogenic, they conduct further assessments to determine the level of risk, and legislators may put regulations in place to limit, or completely halt, the production and use of these chemicals.

de: Brad Reisfeld
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

Coffee won’t give you extra energy, it’ll just borrow a bit that you’ll pay for later

Emma Beckett, University of Newcastle

Many of us want (or should I say need?) our morning coffee to give us our “get up and go”. Altogether, the people of the world drink more than two billion cups of coffee each day.

You might think coffee gives you the energy to get through the morning or the day, but coffee might not be giving you as much as you think.

The main stimulant in coffee is the caffeine. And the main way caffeine works is by changing the way the cells in our brain interact with a compound called adenosine.

de: Emma Beckett
Ştiri ştiinţă - engleză

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