Stories, News, Books, and Videos on Science, Technology, Computers, Environment and the Realites of Life, for the general, smart public
Archive for March, 2010
Want to get rid of Fear and Anxiety? Get more good sleep! Here’s why…
Mar 31st
Scientists have long hypothesized the emotion regulatory role that sleep, specifically REM sleep, might have on humans, but until the time of the current study there was little evidence to support the above claims.
Edward F. Pace-Schott and Mohammed R. Milad from The Harvard Medical School tried to explore the possible ways in which sleep might have evolved to influence the different consolidation memory mechanisms that we are so in need of understanding if we want to develop treatment programs that will cure PTSD, anxiety and other related disorders.
How did they do that? First of all, we must understand a few basic concepts. Fear conditioning is the process by which a emotionally neutral event, like, for example: “seeing a certain object”, “hearing a sound” or “smelling a certain aroma”, might be associated with an “ingrained aversive experience” like being bitten by a spider, getting your hand burned by fire, etc. What happens is that the Conditioned Stimulus (CS), that is, the neutral event, is associated with the Unconditioned Stimulus (US), the aversive experience, so that when the Conditioned Stimulus is triggered again, a certain Conditioned Response (CR) is observed in the person, having the same psychological and physiological characteristics as it would have had if it would have been triggered by the Unconditioned Stimulus.
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Why do we dream? An answer from an evolutionary approach
Mar 29th
Why do people dream, and more specifically why do children sleep and dream so much in their early stages of development? Prior to the current advancements in brain imaging techniques and cognitive sciences, researchers viewed dreaming simply as the result of random neural activity.
Hobson and McCarly’s, 1977, activation-synthesis hypothesis states that dreams are the result of random neural noise generated in the brainstem, the lower part of the brain where all the information to and from our body passes through, that is interpreted by the forebrain, the part of the brain that controls cognitive, sensory and motor functions, in such a way that leads to the subjectively phenomenology of dreaming.
Until recently, this hypothesis fitted well with cognitive models and with the very randomness and difficulty of how each and every one of us is able to recollect and report information from recent dreams in a coherent way. The apparent randomness of dreams is somehow explained by this theory. But could this be all? Nope. Mother Nature doesn’t place dice, indeed! Every behavior, every physical and cognitive trait, every piece of something that a certain organism is endowed with must have an purpose in the real world. And i am going to say, yes, this is also true for dreaming. Although this article is not going to represent a plea in favor of adaptationism, we are going to treat dreaming as a certain adaptive trait that evolved in mammals, reptiles and birds due to specific environmental pressures, trait that might give us a hint about the complexity of the effects those pressures had on mammals, and consequently on homo sapiens, so that they needed to evolve this special tool of dreaming.
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Don’t kid yourself girls! Attractive women get it all! Unattractive ones significantly lower their standards.
Mar 22nd
Attractive women… Who doesn’t want them?! In this article we’ll see who get’s them. And no, we won’t leave normal and unattractive women out of the picture… We’ll see what kind of man they can get.
So why not talk about “smart women”, “ambitious women” or “intelligent women”. Well, whether or not it is harder to admit by the ladies, the physical attractiveness of a female is the most important characteristic she possess, and it is the primary tool with which she attracts her short and long-term partners, and the fundamental knob with which she calibrates the expected value of her future male mates.
Furthermore, it important to say the age of the women is a direct representation of her attractiveness. Women below 30 years old are considered very attractive and healthy, whereas older women begin to score lower points in the above characteristics. Natural selection has programmed women’s brains to follow specific algorithms that make them pursue mates with the overall mate value approximately the same as the their personal mate value. A lot of studies gave us hints about the relation between a woman’s attractiveness and a man’s masculinity, physical attractiveness, sex appeal, muscularity, symmetry, physical fitness, intelligence and confrontativeness, all indicators of good male genes.
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Why do guys balls hang out like that? Here’s the answer!
Mar 22nd
As ugly as human male genitalia might look like, with its wrinkled scrotum carrying the asymmetrically suspended testicles, and hopefully for the owner of the system, accompanied by a lengthy penis that will attract lots of female sexual partners without any work done, one cannot remain unstartled wondering how such a vulnerable gonadal arrangement could have possibly been able to evolve.
From all possible testicular arrangements, (1) descended but ascrotal, (2) not descended and embedded in the body cavity (like whales have them), the third one, (3) descended and scrotal, is the most widespread, being not a peculiarity observed only in humans, but a prevailing gonadal arrangement among almost all mammals Scientists, therefore, say the scrotum is an older primitive adaptation, and consistent with the observations, that the “loss of descensus is relatively rare”, that is, we will rarely observe species with scrotal testicles that are not descended. But why would such an arrangement evolve? What were the reproductive advantages to such a vulnerable display of potency that even the obviously elevated risks in employing it were outscored by the benefits? To answer this question we need to understand a little about how the male an female reproductive organs prepare and engage in in the copulatory act that leads to fertilization.
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Less educated people are more likely to suffer from knee degenerative arthritis
Mar 22nd
It is a well known fact in the scientific bio-medical community, that the Socio-Economic Status (SES) a certain individual possesses might have a powerful impact on his/her’s future health. Due to the very strong connection between the amount of education one gains in the course of adolescence and early twenties, and the socio-economic status he/she will be able to achieve, several past studies tried and managed to prove the linkage between educational attainment and several diseases that find themselves with high prevalence in today’s fast changing world.
As the researchers of the current study state, “individuals from the general population with lower educational attainment have increased chronic disease prevalence, morbidity and mortality as do individuals with specific diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and chronic lung disease”. Coupled with data that showed a strong correlation between education attainment and rheumatic diseases, pain and disability, this current knowledge about the implications the level of schooling might have on prevalent diseases, made scientists Leigh F Callahan and Jack Shreffler, from The Thurston Arthritis Research Center at The Department of Medicine from The University of North Carolina, study the effects education attainment might have on osteoarthritis, also known as degenerative arthritis or degenerative joint disease.
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Explaining The Standard Model – Particle Physics representation of the subatomic world
Mar 14th
Particle Physics, also known as “High Energy Physics” because most elementary constituents that make matter are created in particle accelerators by smashing subatomic particles in highly energetic collisions, has achieved until now to draw a very emblematic image of the subatomic realm.
It seems that all the hundreds of particles detected beginning from the 1960′s can be explained by the existence of a few elementary particles, which properties are described in detail into what is now called The Standard Model of Particle Physics.
In fact discussing about particles when explaining the subatomic realm is quite a fallacious and misguided approach. As quantum mechanics predicts, and empirically (experimentally) demonstrates, matter is both a wave and a particle, at least at the subatomic level. Actually, The Standard Model is a quantum mechanical field description, that is, a explanation in therms of waves, of the phenomena that are observed in the experiments that are conducted in all particle accelerators around the world. Particles are described by complex abstract mathematical constructs like state vectors, Hilbert spaces, etc. (see Quantum Field Theory for more information).
