Travel Photo of the Week

Beach at Placencia, Belize. Photo by Tim Rock.

New Theory Doesn’t Limit Consciousness To The Brain

This in from Science News: "Each split second of awareness is a unified, holistic experience, completely different from any experience before or after it."

Giulio Tononi intuited a powerful new theory of consciousness, a theory based on the flow of information and his theory defines consciousness as the capacity of a system — any system — to connect and use that information.

Tononi’s idea extends beyond humans. By moving from nerve cells to the math that describes them, he has broken the theory of consciousness away from the physical brain. His equations can fit any system. With the right calculations, scientists could test whether a tornado with its innumerable dust particles circling in unison, 2050’s iPhone or the trillions of megabytes of information zooming around the Internet could have some degree of consciousness. Personally, I've always wondered whether stars or other celestial bodies could be conscious. Under this notion they certainly could be tested.

Why Everything Is Connected To Everything Else, Explained In 100 Seconds

The underlying theme of this blog is that everything is connected. Here is physicist Brian Cox prooving it.

Guys! A New Way To Play With Your Balls!

Now that I have your attention.



Want to know more? Go to their website, gosphero.com.

Fun Time!

The Periodic Table that's a table.

The Man Who Prints Houses

3D printing is all the rage these days. Ten years ago it was in its infancy and was the province of university labs. The equipment was expensive and enormous and only printed out fragile plastic toys.

Today the technology is starting to come on line for the rest of us. MakerBot Industries will sell you a machine for about a grand that will allow you to print out 3D plastic items from your home computer. Other companies are developing printers that use metal.

Now, here comes Enrico Dini. He is developing a machine that will use sand and print out a house. Don't believe me? Here's a video............


The Man Who Prints Houses Trailer from Marc Webb on Vimeo.

Is That A Faster Than Light Neutrino I See, Or Is Your Cable Just Loose?

After all the hoopla about Einstein being wrong about the speed-of-light thing, it's looking like it may have just been a loose cable that caused scientists to think that neutrinos might be going faster than photons.

Here's a link to the Reuters' article on this "breakthrough." CERN will be running tests on this in May. In the article it stated that the possible error "concerns the optical fiber connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken," said CERN. "If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos."

Such a shame...just when I was ready to book that trip back to the Renaissance to help Leonardo get that helicopter thing working..

Travel Photo of the Week

Trunk Bay, St. Johns USVI - Photo by Gigi Amr

Robert Davidovitz's "Woven Paint" Series

These beautiful "paintings" are created from "thread" made of extruded paint that is then woven into tapestries. They are the creation of Robert Davidovitz and here is a link to an interview with the artist and a slideshow of his work.

The History of the Universe: From Big Bang to Big Blah

Here's the progression from:

BIG BANG

To now-ish.............

To the distant future............

Tell me true; don't you feel better now you know how it's all going to turn out?

From Scientific American.