Category Archives: thinking linking

thinking linking

Bookmarks for May 18th

  • How exercise affects the brain: Age and genetics play a role – Exercise clears the mind. It gets the blood pumping and more oxygen is delivered to the brain. This is familiar territory, but Dartmouth's David Bucci thinks there is much more going on."In the last several years there have been data suggesting that neurobiological changes are happening — [there are] very brain-specific mechanisms at work here," says Bucci, an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
    Tags: health
thinking linking

Bookmarks for May 13th

  • Bioscience and the New Threat | mediapathic – So the solution, according to Wiley, is to doctor the plants to produce more food and more nutritional value. Most agricultural businesses claim that this is what they do, but Wiley claims that they focus excessively on ease of shipping and other qualities that are directly profitable, at the cost of healthy food. There’s an entire network of people dedicated to smuggling seeds and cuttings to small farms around the world. They use many techniques, and some of the same pathways, as drug smugglers. There’s an uneasy permeability between the world of agriculture and narcotics. Last year the US border patrol reported one bust which netted them 10 kilos of cocaine and several canisters filled with squash seeds. Underground grow rooms and heat dissipation systems, traditionally used for growing marijuana under the watchful eye of the War on Drugs, are now being used in some places for growing food.
    Tags: research science biotech
thinking linking

Bookmarks for May 3rd

  • Architizer Blog » Living Infrastructure Growing Bridges – Growing your own house may seem like a new idea, but what about growing pieces of functional infrastructure? That’s exactly what the locals of Nongriat in Meghalaya, India have been doing for the past 500 years. In that time, they’ve grown bridges over one hundred feet in length and strong enough to support the weight of more than 50 people. There are even “double decker” bridges!
    Tags: research anthropology
thinking linking

Bookmarks for April 19th

  • Kidney stone mystery solved: Why some people are more prone to develop kidney stones – Most kidney stones form when the urine becomes too concentrated, allowing minerals like calcium to crystallize and stick together. Diet plays a role in the condition — not drinking enough water or eating too much salt (which binds to calcium) also increases the risk of stones.

    It goes on to say they maybe able to develop a drug that takes care of this. How about having doctors recommend drinking more water, eating less salt, and cutting down on calcium (dairy products, etc.) in your diet?

    But genes are partly to blame. A common genetic variation in a gene called claudin-14 recently has been linked to a substantial increase in risk — roughly 65 percent — of getting kidney stones. In the new study, the researchers have shown how alterations in the gene's activity influence the development of stones.
    Tags: research health

thinking linking

Bookmarks for April 16th

  • What is contemporary global nomadism and how does it affect materialism? – "Globalization theorists argue that global nomadism will become more prevalent in the future, and thus the liquid relationship to possessions that we identify will become an important lens in which to understand the new role of objects in people's lives, as consumers will seek to temporarily access objects rather than own them over long periods of time," the authors conclude.
    Tags: research SF travel
  • Why time warps: Mysteries of time perception explored – "The brain creates its own time, making it remarkably easy to trick the brain's clock. Mind time is different from clock time. It is the inner time we experience and it can pass fast or slowly depending on whether we are waiting for a train, working hard or free falling from a plane. Our relationship with time is not straightforward."
    Tags: science research
thinking linking

Bookmarks for April 14th

  • Enemy me on Facebook – Ideas – The Boston Globe – In a friend-obsessed world, research is uncovering real benefits to having a nemesis

    having a nemesis is in many ways as intense and personal a relationship as having a friend, and studies in the animal world and the human one are revealing that those relationships matter, too. For animals, dear enemies may allow individuals to spend less time and energy fighting with foes; for humans, direct personal rivals appear to help people push their performance. A small number of researchers are exploring how these relationships affect our motivation and success — and although “enemy studies” isn’t likely to ever become its own discipline, their findings provide a different and perhaps more realistic way to think about how competition works.
    Tags: research science comics

  • ‘Sounds of silence’ proving a hit: World’s fastest random number generator – The researchers — Professor Ping Koy Lam, Dr Thomas Symul and Dr Syed Assad from the ANU ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology — have tuned their very sensitive light detectors to listen to vacuum — a region of space that is empty.

    Professor Lam said vacuum was once thought to be completely empty, dark, and silent until the discovery of the modern quantum theory. Since then scientists have discovered that vacuum is an extent of space that has virtual sub-atomic particles spontaneously appearing and disappearing.
    Tags: science space research tech

thinking linking

Bookmarks for April 7

  • Is some homophobia self-phobia? – Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
    Tags: science research