reblog.jointselecta.net

It’s a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time. For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago, and it then took about 2.5 billion more years for multi-cellular life to evolve. That leaves just a billion years or so for […]

From Time Magazine:
The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn’t respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler […]

Senses in the news:

This seems too good to be true:

But apparently it is true. See this paper and this blog post.
If you’re lucky enough to have eyes, here’s a good analysis of how all your visual inputs get put together into a single representation.
For robots, a sense of smell is important, too.
The next robotic […]

The lead story in today’s Science section of the New York Times isn’t really about science at all, but it’s opposite: superstition. The notion that we’re hard-wired to believe in a god has received a lot of attention of late, but now we’re told that we also might be genetically programmed to believe in magic, […]

Des médecins américains ont greffé des cellules souches sur une fillette leucémique. L’opération a été effectuée il y a trois ans, à partir du sang contenu dans le cordon ombilical de l’enfant.
Biomédecine - Leucémique et guérie grâce à ses propres cellules ?
Originally from RFI - Actualité monde

A clumsy video that tries to find answers to philosophical questions by using diagrams, connections, magic words and a great dose of sarcasm. “Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand ‘association-chain-massacre’ which challenges itself to answer all questions of the […]

From Prospect Magazine:
Old age hardly exists in wild animals. Accident, illness or predation usually kill long before the potential lifespan has been reached. Humans, though, especially in the developed world, are pushing in ever larger numbers towards the maximum lifespan, thought by most gerontologists to be around 120. (The world longevity record is held […]

Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) has written a series of articles for the Wall Street Journal on intelligence (available free here). One frustrating aspect of the articles is that Murray doesn’t cite his sources. Consider this statement:
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of […]

Is the mathematical avant-garde getting so abstruse that it stretches the limits of the human mind? Is it dangerous when a science becomes entirely dependent upon the calculations of computers? Here’s Sharon Begley in the WSJ:
Mathematicians have become increasingly vexed that some statements about numbers cannot be proved by humans. Worse, the proofs that computers […]