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Brain shuts off in response to healer’s prayer – life – 27 April 2010 – New Scientist
WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That's the finding of a study which looked at people's response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers.
To identify the brain processes underlying the influence of charismatic individuals, Uffe Schjødt of Aarhus University in Denmark and colleagues turned to Pentecostal Christians, who believe that some people have divinely inspired powers of healing, wisdom and prophecy.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Schjødt and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that six of the prayers were read by a non-Christian, six by an ordinary Christian and six by a healer. In fact, all were read by ordinary Christians.
Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq023).
via Brain shuts off in response to healer’s prayer – life – 27 April 2010 – New Scientist.
Roman ingots to shield particle detector : Nature News
s a testimony to the extent of ancient Romes manufacturing and trading capacities, the ingots are of great value to archaeologists, who have been preserving and studying them at the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, southern Sardinia. What makes the ingots equally valuable to physicists is the fact that over the past 2,000 years their lead has almost completely lost its natural radioactivity. It is therefore the perfect material with which to shield the CUORE Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events detector, which Italys National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN is building at the Gran Sasso laboratory.
Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself | Wired Science | Wired.com
For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input.Scientists designed “Adam” to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.”It’s a major advance,” says David Waltz of the Center forComputational Learning Systems at Columbia University. “Science is being done here in a way that incorporates artificial intelligence.It’s automating a part of the scientific process that hasn’t been automated in the past.”The demonstration of autonomous science breaks major ground.Researchers have been automating portions of the scientific process for decades, using robotic laboratory instruments to screen for drugs and sequence genomes, but humans are usually responsible for forming the hypotheses and designing the experiments themselves. After the experiments are complete, the humans must exert themselves again to draw conclusions.
via Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself | Wired Science | Wired.com.
PLAY | FUTURESTATES | ITVS
Playby David Kaplan and Eric ZimmermanSocietys obsession with video and online gaming has advanced to the point that virtual environments are indistinguishable from physical ones.Go behind the scenes and read about the making:http://futurestates.tv/episodes/play