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mendax writes:

I may start growing 'shrooms in my dark and dank pantry and get off Celexa after reading this New York Times article about what may be the medicinal qualities of magic mushrooms:

A study published last month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface compared M.R.I.s of the brains of subjects injected with psilocybin [the psychoactive agent in magic mushrooms] with scans of their normal brain activity. The brains on psilocybin showed radically different connectivity patterns between cortical regions (the parts thought to play an important role in consciousness). The researchers mapped out these connections, revealing the activity of new neural networks between otherwise disconnected brain regions.

The researchers suspect that these unusual connections may be responsible for the synaesthetic experience trippers describe, of hearing colors, for example, and seeing sounds. The part of the brain that processes sound may be connecting to the part of the brain that processes sight. The study’s leader [said that] his team doubted that this psilocybin-induced connectivity lasted. They think they are seeing a temporary modification of the subject’s brain function.

The fact that under the influence of psilocybin the brain temporarily behaves in a new way may be medically significant in treating psychological disorders like depression. “When suffering depression, people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts and cannot get out of it,” [the study's leader] said. “One can imagine that breaking any pattern that prevents a ‘proper’ functioning of the brain can be helpful.” Think of it as tripping a breaker or rebooting your computer.

aristarchus writes:

Not surprisingly, if you are using Twitter or Facebook for serious scientific research, your results may be a pile of data. Some scientists have studied the reliability of social media and decided it is not.

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook should not be used to gauge human behaviour or trends because they are too biased, scientists have warned.

Color me, surprised?

Horse With Stripes asks some interesting questions regarding large corporations using crowd-funding and writes:

Sony used the Japanese crowd-funding site Makuake as a test balloon for its new e-paper based watch. Both Forbes and Mashable have stories on this, though neither touches on my first reaction: why is a enormous multi-national corporation worth tens of billions of dollars using a crowd-funding site to fund new products?

One of Sony's statements claims "We hid Sony’s name because we wanted to test the real value of the product, whether there will be demand for our concept", which may be true but doesn't justify taking consumer's money up front for a product that it may never even deliver.

How many "customers" who placed pre-orders would have thought differently if they knew it was Sony who was the actual source of this yet-to-be-made product? How many would be weary of providing their personal information to a company like Sony?

Is this what we're to expect in the future from large, established, wealthy corporations? Having crowd-funders finance the development of future products, with no legal obligation of ever delivering the product? This all seems so wrong to me on so many levels. It does not surprise me that Sony would be at the forefront of this type of manoeuvre. Should crowd-funding sites do a better job of identifying the actual company or individuals behind projects posted on their sites?

hubie writes:

LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing method analogous to RADAR. Pulses of laser light are sent out via a transmitter, and the detected reflected pulses are converted into a distance to target. When LIDAR systems are flown from an airplane, a topographic map of the surface of the Earth is created. One of its powerful features is that one can separate out the bare Earth data to construct an image of the ground, i.e., one can "see" through ground canopy and other vegetative cover that otherwise obscures the underlying features.

Being able to see through ground cover has opened new discoveries for archaeologists. An article in the Journal of Archaeological Science looks at the Las Médulas site in Spain, which is considered to be the largest opencast gold mine of the Roman Empire. The LIDAR observations revealed the scope of the gold mine was much larger than was previously known, and new details of the ancient mining works revealed such as the hydraulics system used as well as evidence of multiple river diversions.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Most major American cities have long used a system to limit the number of operating taxicabs, typically a medallion system: Drivers must own or rent a medallion to operate a taxi, and the city issues a fixed number of them. Now Josh Barro reports at the NYT that in major cities throughout the United States, taxi medallion prices are tumbling as taxis face competition from car-service apps like Uber and Lyft. The average price of an individual New York City taxi medallion fell to $872,000 in October, down 17 percent from a peak reached in the spring of 2013, according to an analysis of sales data. "I’m already at peace with the idea that I’m going to go bankrupt,” said Larry Ionescu, who owns 98 Chicago taxi medallions. As recently as April, Boston taxi medallions were selling for $700,000. The last sale, in October, was for $561,000. “Right now Uber has a strong presence here in Boston, and that’s having a dramatic impact on the taxi industry and the medallion values,” says Donna Blythe-Shaw, a spokeswoman for the Boston Taxi Drivers’ Association. “We hear that there’s a couple of medallion owners that have offered to sell at 425 and nobody’s touched them."

The current structure of the American taxi industry began in New York City when “taxi medallions” were introduced in the 1930s. Taxis were extremely popular in the city, and the government realized they needed to make sure drivers weren’t psychopaths luring victims into their cars. So, New York City required cabbies to apply for a taxi medallion license. Given the technology available in the 1930s, It was a reasonable solution to the taxi safety problem, and other cities soon followed suit. But their scarcity has made taxi medallions the best investment in America for years. Where they exist, taxi medallions have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009. The medallion stakeholders are many and deep pockets run this market. The system in Chicago and elsewhere is dominated by large investors who rely on brokers to sell medallions, specialty banks to finance them and middle men to manage and lease them to drivers who own nothing at all. Together, they’re fighting to protect an asset that was worth about $2.4 billion in Chicago last year. “The medallion owners seem to be of the opinion that they are entitled to indefinite appreciation of their asset,” says Corey ­Owens, Uber’s head of global public policy.. “The taxi medallion in the U.S. was the best investment you could have made in the last 30 years. Will it go up forever? No. And if they expected that it would, that was their mistake.”

frojack writes:

The Greek legend of Jason and his Argonauts may have a grain of truth to it, as well as more than a few grains of gold.

According to story on 1ClickNews, Scientists from Ilia State University, Georgia, claim that villagers in the Svaneti region of modern Georgia used fleece to help them extract gold and some still do it today.

Ancient villagers used sheepskins to line stream beds in the Svaneti region of the Southern Caucasus in northwest Georgia. Gold flakes washing from mountain streams became ingrained on the fleeces, which scientists believe led to the rise of the myth surrounding the Golden Fleece.

The technique is not dissimilar to small scale placer miners where the sluice box is lined with burlap to entrap the fine flake gold in the gravel.

Geological surveys by Dr Okrostsvaridze and his team reveal that gold deposits in many areas that were historically mined have been replenished as streams have continued to wash them down the mountainsides, and some locals still use traditional techniques to obtain gold from the rivers in the area.

martyb writes:

In tests performed on rats, researchers discovered that their brains perceived reality completely differently from virtual reality:

"The pattern of activity in a brain region involved in spatial learning in the virtual world is completely different than when it processes activity in the real world," said Mayank Mehta, a UCLA professor of physics, neurology and neurobiology in the UCLA College and the study's senior author. "Since so many people are using virtual reality, it is important to understand why there are such big differences."

The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The scientists were studying the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in diseases such as Alzheimer's, stroke, depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder. The hippocampus also plays an important role in forming new memories and creating mental maps of space. For example, when a person explores a room, hippocampal neurons become selectively active, providing a "cognitive map" of the environment.

[...] To test whether the hippocampus could actually form spatial maps using only visual landmarks, Mehta's team devised a non-invasive virtual reality environment and studied how the hippocampal neurons in the brains of rats reacted in the virtual world without the ability to use smells and sounds as cues.

[...] The scientists were surprised to find that the results from the virtual and real environments were entirely different. In the virtual world, the rats' hippocampal neurons seemed to fire completely randomly, as if the neurons had no idea where the rat was -- even though the rats seemed to behave perfectly normally in the real and virtual worlds.

Journal reference: "Impaired spatial selectivity and intact phase precession in two-dimensional virtual reality." Nature Neuroscience, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3884

AnonTechie writes:

Thanks in part to America’s ill-defined hacking laws, prosecutors have enormous discretion to determine a hacker defendant’s fate. But in one young Texan’s case in particular, the Department of Justice stretched prosecutorial overreach to a new extreme: about 440 years too far.

Last week, prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas reached a plea agreement with 28-year-old Fidel Salinas, in which the young hacker with alleged ties to members of Anonymous consented to plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of computer fraud and abuse and pay $10,000 in restitution. The U.S. attorney’s office omitted one fact from its press release about that plea ( http://www.justice.gov/usao/txs/1News/Releases/2014%20November/141120%20-%20Salinas.html ), however: Just months ago, Salinas had been charged with not one, but 44 felony counts of computer fraud and cyberstalking—crimes that each carry a 10-year maximum sentence; adding up to an absurd total of nearly a half a millennium of prison time.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/from-440-years-to-misdemeanor/

tonyPick writes:

medium.com has an article from musician Jack Conte on the economics of a recent tour with the band Pomplamoose.

Pomplamoose is a musical duo, featuring Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, who primarily distribute their music online, and the article covers the recent 28 day tour and highlights the new economics of the emerging music business away from the traditional major labels, and although the band actually lost money overall on the tour (despite the success of the shows) they view this as the cost of investment in building a fanbase for future tours, and the current model they have of making music as viable.

tonyPick writes:

The Conversation has an article on the case for mining the moon:

This article is by Ian Crawford, Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London, and summarises a more detailed paper review of Lunar resources (preprint version available), by the same author published in Progress in Physical Geography.

tonyPick writes:

IEEE Spectrum has an article on a DIY Exoplanet Detector, using a Canon DSLR and telephoto lens.

The article goes over the construction of the star tracker mechanism using an Arduino, and the data processing, which is used to successfully detect exoplanet transits for the star HD 189733, and links to a YouTube video summary of the construction process.

AnonTechie writes:

Harvard materials scientist Jennifer A. Lewis, whose pioneering work in the field of microscale 3D printing is advancing the development of artificial organs, flexible electronics, and special new materials, has been named among Foreign Policy magazine's "100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2014." ( http://globalthinkers.foreignpolicy.com/ )

Lewis, the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard ( http://wyss.harvard.edu/ ), was honored among innovators "for showing how ink could reshape the future."

"With her team at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Lewis has printed materials that mimic the lightweight strength of balsa wood for potential use in wind turbines and batteries that could streamline the assembly of small electronics," the Foreign Policy editors wrote. "In February, her team reported that it had printed cellular tissue constructs with embedded blood vessels—a step toward the manufacture of artificial organs."
"Lewis's work shows that 3D printing won't just change how people make things," they wrote. "It will also change what, exactly, people can make."

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/jennifer-lewis-named-foreign-policy-global-thinker

novak writes:

I ran across this article from last year again and it got me thinking. The article is a story about how a hardware hacker was able to hack hard drive firmware, first to upload his own firmware, but also to take advantage of the embedded controller, and even install linux on the controller. If you haven't read it it's fairly impressive. [Ed's Comment: I would go further and say that it is a amazing piece of hacking, in the traditional meaning of the word.]

It seems that lately there have been a lot of vulnerabilities targeting embedded peripherals. Those in the article come to mind, also badUSB, and some IPMI vulnerabilities.

What do you think? Are the number of attack vectors targeting embedded peripherals a consequence of more powerful controllers? Worse software? More sophisticated attackers? Or just a random occurrence?

SlimmPickens writes:

Sophisticated malware called Regin has beed discovered by Symantec and Kaspersky Labs.

PC Authority reports

fliptop writes:

Life seems pretty good right now for Jolla, the Finnish mobile device maker formed in 2011 by former Nokia employees. Their tablet crowdfunding goal of $380k was reached hours after the Indiegogo campaign started. Currently they've raised just over $1.3m, prompting Jolla to add new funding targets this week:

The price is also competitive, with Indiegogo backers being charged $209 for the device and Jolla anticipating the final retail price of the device will be $249...if total funding reaches $2.5m, Jolla will begin offering HSDPA connectivity as an add-on for $30.

In answering the question to whether the market needs another tablet, Jolla CEO Marc Dillon responded:

"The great thing with this tablet we are launching is that not only is it state of the art in software, it can also be state of the art in specifications and at a very competitive price. Now we are really able to compete with the big companies on what they have traditionally dominated - the supply chain..."