Playing with Perception

About 10 years ago, psychologists in Pennsylvania discovered an amazing illusion. They found that they could convince people that a rubber hand was their own by putting it on a table in front of them while stroking it in the same way as their real hand. 

The now-famous "rubber hand illusion" was not only a mind-blowing party trick, it was also hugely important in understanding how sight, touch and "proprioception" - the sense of body position - combine to create a convincing feeling of body ownership, one of the foundations of self-consciousness. 

In recent years that understanding has been explored further using increasingly freaky illusions. "The rubber hand illusion really inspired people," says Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. 

He is one of many researchers who have taken the illusion and run with it, creating a whole new set of "bodily illusions" that mess with our sense of self in strange and disturbing ways. "We're doing all kinds of crazy stuff," he says.

From NewScientist.com. Click here for the full article. 

Higgs Boson Discovery Has Consequences

Now confirming the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, physicists are wrestling with implications of actually finding it ~ the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the so-called Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

LiveScience is listing what it sees as the six largest consequences of the discovery, listed here in abbreviated form:

1. The origin of mass

"The Higgs mechanism is the thing that allows us to understand how the particles acquire mass," said Joao Guimaraes da Costa, a physicist at Harvard. "If there was no such mechanism, then everything would be massless."

2. The Standard Model

The reigning theory of particle physics describes the universe's very small constituents. Every particle predicted by the Standard Model had been discovered ~ except one: the Higgs boson. "It's the missing piece in the Standard Model," Jonas Strandberg, a researcher at CERN said last year of the particle announcement. "So it would definitely be a confirmation that the theories we have now are right."

3. The electroweak force

The confirmation of the Higgs also helps to explain how two of the fundamental forces of the universe ~ the electromagnetic force that governs interactions between charged particles, and the weak force that's responsible for radioactive decay ~ can be unified.

4. Supersymmetry

This idea posits that every known particle has a "superpartner" particle with slightly different characteristics. Supersymmetry is attractive because it could help unify some of the other forces of nature, and even offers a candidate for the particle that makes up dark matter.

5. Validation of LHC

The newly announced finding offers major validation for the Large Hadron Collider and for the scientists who've worked on the search for many years.

6. Is the universe doomed?

The Higgs boson discovery opens the door to new calculations that weren't previously possible, scientists say, including one that suggests the universe is in for a cataclysm billions of years from now. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out," added Lykken, a collaborator on the CMS experiment.

Click here for the article.

Skeleton Saint Gaining Popularity in U.S.

Long popular in Mexico, the skeleton saint La Santa Muerte is gaining a robust following north of the border among many non-Latinos, many of them shunning organized religion.

Wearing a black nun's robe and holding a scythe in one hand, Santa Muerte appeals to people seeking all manner of otherworldly help: from fending off wrongdoing and carrying out vengeance to stopping lovers from cheating and landing better jobs. 

According to the Associated Press:

"Her growth in the United States has been extraordinary," said Andrew Chesnut, author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint and the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Because you can ask her for anything, she has mass appeal and is now gaining a diverse group of followers throughout the country. She's the ultimate multi-tasker." 

The saint is especially popular among Mexican-American Catholics, rivaling that of St. Jude and La Virgen de Guadalupe as a favorite for miracle requests, even as the Catholic Church in Mexico denounces Santa Muerte as satanic, experts say. 

The origins of La Santa Muerte are unclear. Some followers say she is an incarnation of an Aztec goddess of death who ruled the underworld. Some scholars say she originated in medieval Spain through the image of La Parca, a female Grim Reaper, who was used by friars for the later evangelization of indigenous populations in the Americas.

 For decades, though, La Santa Muerte remained an underground figure in isolated regions of Mexico and served largely as an unofficial Catholic saint that women called upon to help with cheating spouses.

Click here for the article and more photos.

Pace of Human Evolution is Quickening

A massive study of human genetic variation has estimated the age of more than one million variants ~ or changes to our DNA code ~ found across human populations and found that the vast majority proved to be quite young.

These chronologies show that recent human history is characterized by both narrow reproductive genetic bottlenecks and sudden, enormous population growth. The evolutionary dynamics of these features have resulted in a flood of new genetic variation, accumulating so fast that natural selection hasn’t caught up yet.

As a species, we are freshly bursting with the raw material of evolution.

According to Wired.com:

“Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so. There hasn’t been much time for random change or deterministic change through natural selection,” said geneticist Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, study co-author. “We have a repository of all this new variation for humanity to use as a substrate. In a way, we’re more evolvable now than at any time in our history.” 

 Akey specializes in what’s known as rare variation, or changes in DNA that are found in perhaps one in 100 people, or even fewer. For practical reasons, rare variants have only been studied in earnest for the last several years. Before then, it was simply too expensive. 

A conclusion of the new findings is that the genetic potential of our population is vastly different than what it was 10,000 years ago.

Image from Wired's Darwin Photoshop contest.

Click here for the article.

Giant Planet Darker Than Black Paint

A planet blacker than coal? That’s what astronomers say they've discovered in our home galaxy with NASA’s Kepler telescope. Orbiting only about three million miles out from its star, the Jupiter-size gas giant planet ~ named TrES-2b ~ reflects almost none of the starlight that shines on it, according to a new study.

"Being less reflective than coal or even the blackest acrylic paint ~ this makes it by far the darkest planet ever discovered," lead study author David Kipping said. "If we could see it up close it would look like a near-black ball of gas, with a slight glowing red tinge to it—a true exotic amongst exoplanets."

The Kepler spacecraft was specifically designed to find planets outside our solar system. But at such distances ~TrES-2b, for instance, is 750 light-years from us ~ it's not as simple as snapping pictures of alien worlds. Instead, Kepler uses light sensors called photometers that continuously monitor tens of thousands of stars as it looks for the regular dimming of stars.

Such dips in stellar brightness may indicate that a planet is transiting, or passing in front of a star, relative to Earth, blocking some of the star's light. In the case of the coal-black planet, blocking surprisingly little of that light.

Image shows TrES-2b, mostly black with a reddish glow.

Click here for the article.

Heartbeat Is Clue to Personality Type

A new study in Germany identifies heartbeat "signatures" ~ wave patterns in the heart's electrical activity ~ that are linked to personality types.

People with certain heartbeat signatures scored higher on tests of neuroticism ~ meaning these individuals tend to experience more negative emotions, such as anxiety and a depressed mood. They also tended to experience fewer positive emotions, including happiness and cheerfulness. Measures of the heart's electrical activity could also be used to predict people's agreeableness, a personality trait that describes how compassionate or empathetic an individual is. 

The study suggests such heartbeat signatures may provide a way to measure personality that is more objective than current methods. Personality is commonly assessed using questionnaires, but these are subject to bias ~ people may choose responses that they think are more acceptable for their gender, for instance, or they may misperceive their own traits, the researchers said.

"We hope that with this method, we have found something that is perhaps more accurate, and more relatable, than many other measures of personality," said study researcher Stefan Koelsch, a professor of biological psychology at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Researchers may also be able to identify heartbeat signatures that are characteristic of certain emotional disorders, such as depression, Koelsch said. Such signatures could one day help diagnose these disorders, or identify people at risk for them, he said. 

Click here for the LiveSciencearticle. 

Higgs Boson Spells Doom and Gloom

The long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle is a key ingredient in a calculation that predicts the future of space and time.

"This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there'll be a catastrophe," says Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It may be the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out."

The Higgs boson particle is a manifestation of an energy field pervading the universe called the Higgs field, which is thought to explain why particles have mass. After searching for decades for proof that this field and particle existed, physicists at the LHC announced in July 2012 that they'd discovered a particle whose properties strongly suggest it is the Higgs boson.

Click here for the article.

Human Genetic Variations Changing Rapidly

In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, researchers have determined that the age of more than one million variants ~ or changes to our DNA code ~ found across human populations is quite young. 

The chronologies tell a story of evolutionary dynamics in recent human history ~ the last 10,000 years ~ a period characterized by both narrow reproductive bottlenecks and enormous population growth.

According to Wired.com:

The evolutionary dynamics of these features resulted in a flood of new genetic variation, accumulating so fast that natural selection hasn’t caught up yet. As a species, we are freshly bursting with the raw material of evolution. 

“Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so. There hasn’t been much time for random change or deterministic change through natural selection,” said geneticist Joshua Akey of the University of Washington. “We have a repository of all this new variation for humanity to use as a substrate. In a way, we’re more evolvable now than at any time in our history.” 

But these findings can also been seen from another angle. They teach us about human evolution, in particular the course it’s taken since modern Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa. 

“We’ve gone from several hundred million people to seven billion in a blink of evolutionary time,” said Akey. “That’s had a profound effect on structuring the variation present in our species.”

For practical reasons, rare genetic variants have only been studied for the last several years because it’s been too expensive. Genomics focused mostly on what are known as common variants.

Click here for the article.