People hear with their skin
In a paper in Nature, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia report that people can hear with their skin. Link to article in the NY Times.
In a paper in Nature, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia report that people can hear with their skin. Link to article in the NY Times.
Honeybees, which have been the focus of Chittka’s work, have tiny brains with fewer than a million neurons. Yet, the insects can classify shapes as symmetrical or asymmetrical. They can pick objects based on concepts like “same” or “different.” They can also learn to stop flying after a prescribed number of landmarks rather than after a certain distance. Read more at MSNBC and learn why computing power is not the hurdle to building AI.
d’Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life… “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.” Read more at citypages.com
Indian election authorities Thursday granted what they called an independent identity to intersex and transsexuals in the country’s voter lists. Before, members of these groups — loosely called eunuchs in Indian English — were referred to as male or female in the voter rolls. But now, they will have the choice to tick “O” — for others — when indicating their gender in voter forms, the Indian election commission said in a statement. Link to CNN article.
“Our results fit a longstanding theory which says that the common ancestor of humans and apes communicated through meaningful gestures and, over time, the brain regions that processed gestures became adapted for using words,” Braun said. “If the theory is correct, our language areas may actually be the remnant of this ancient communication system, one that continues to process gesture as well as language in the human brain.” Link to article via Healthday News.
Hey, Peter, Representative Stupak and your 64 Democratic supporters, Jim Wallis and other anti-choice “progressive” Christians, men: Why don’t you take one for the team for a change and see how you like it?
For example, budget hawks in Congress say they’ll vote against the bill because it’s too expensive. Maybe you could win them over if you volunteered to cut out funding for male-exclusive stuff, like prostate cancer, Viagra, male infertility, vasectomies, growth-hormone shots for short little boys, long-term care for macho guys who won’t wear motorcycle helmets and, I dunno, psychotherapy for pedophile priests. Men could always pay in advance for an insurance policy rider, as women are blithely told they can do if Stupak becomes part of the final bill.
Read more by Katha Pollitt at the Guardian.
150 Years After Origin: Biological, Historical, and Philosophical Perspectives
Victoria College, University of Toronto, November 21-24, 2009
Darwin wrote in his autobiography, “In July [1837] I opened my first notebook for facts in relation to the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for the next twenty years.” In 1842, he wrote a “very brief abstract” of his theory (35 pages), which in the summer of 1844 he expanded to 230 pages. Beginning in September 1858, after receiving an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” which outlined the central mechanism of evolution on which Darwin had been working, he began work on completing the manuscript of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray, the publisher, launched the book on November 24, 1859 by releasing 1,250 copies. The impact of The Origin of Species has equalled the impact of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. It is the unifying theoretical framework for all modern biology.
November 24, 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin and The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Department of Philosophy at University of Toronto are mounting a Gala Celebratory Conference. The conference will culminate in a gala dinner on November 24 at which participants will toast the tremendous achievement of Charles Robert Darwin.
Five multi-disciplinary symposia have been organized. For each symposium, the panel consists of a biologist, a historian of biology and a philosopher of biology.
The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology is located on the elegant, historic Victoria University campus (one of the University of Toronto’s federated universities) and the conference will be held in that location.
Say hello if you’re in the area!