That's the finding of researchers Joël Fagot of France's Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive and Roger Thompson of the US's Franklin & Marshall College. They ran an experiment in which 29 baboons were shown two identical squares on a touch screen. When the baboons touched one of the squares, the squares disappeared and two new pairs of shapes emerged. One typical combination was one pair of a star and triangle and another pair of two identical ovals.
For the baboons to get the reward, they had to choose the identical ovals over the dissimilar shapes. This was repeated through several experiments, but each time the specific type of identical shape changed, meaning the baboons couldn't simply pick the ovals - they had to understand why the researchers wanted them to choose the identical shapes. This means they had to recognize why two pairs of identical shapes were similar, even if the specific shapes were different.
It isn't just about recognizing relationships - it's about understanding the relationships between different relationships, and that's exactly what an analogy is. (You might remember the classic "X is to Y as W is to Z", or X:Y::W:Z type of analogy from high school English.) Sure, that's a pretty simple analogy, but there's no way to consistently pass the test without grasping that core concept. And it was hardly an easy task - only six of the 29 baboons managed to figure out the analogy, suggesting this is a form of reasoning that is at the very cusp of what baboons are able to do.
"For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable," he said. "A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain."Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, told lawmakers Thursday that the end of the space shuttle era has left the American human spaceflight program in an "embarrassing" state.
Deadline reports that 20th Century Fox, is developing a live-action feature film version of adaptation of Issac Asimov’s 1954 novel The Caves of Steel.
The Caves of Steel will be produced by Simon Kinberg, the X-Men scribe whose Genre Films banner is based at the studio. Similar to I, Robot (which Fox turned into a hit film with Will Smith), The Caves of Steel is a murder mystery that takes place 1,000 years in the future, on an overpopulated Earth where there is a phobia about robots. The title refers to giant city complexes that are necessary because Earth is so overpopulated. While robots are used for labor in outlying “spacer worlds” where the rich live on spacious parcels, the robots are outlawed on Earth. A Spacer Ambassador lobbying to loosen Earth’s anti-robot restrictions is found dead, his chest imploded by an energy blaster, and a detective is matched with a human-looking robot to solve the crime. Hobson is repped by CAA and Energy Entertainment.
Henry Hobson is attached as director, with John Scott 3 (yep, that’s his moniker) set to write the screenplay. Hobson is know primarily as a titles designer for films such as SHERLOCK HOLMES and RANGO, while Scott 3 works with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Seems like an odd pairing, but the two are first collaborating on a teenage Zombie film entitled MAGGIE.
Asimov’s The Caves of Steel was first published as a serial in Galaxy Magazine in 1963, and quickly picked up as a novel by Doubleday. The tale is a murder mystery sent on an over-populated Earth about three thousand years in the future. Here agoraphoic humans live in domed cities and rarely if ever see the outside world.
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| Yes, I know this is a picture of a chimpanzee brain, but it looks pretty cool, right? |
Your brain runs on sugar.
Your brain's main supply of energy is the monosaccharide glucose. While your brain only weighs between 3 to 5 pounds, it makes use of approximately 15-20% of your body's daily caloric needs. It has been long thought that the glucose was consumed as a function of cognitive experience, and research on rats shows that when a more cognitively challenging task is placed before them, more glucose is depleted. This phenomenon also appears to extend to humans.
In the journal article Glucose, memory, and aging, published by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers observed that elderly patients who were given lemonade sweetened with glucose experienced a nearly two fold increase in short term memory when asked to recall a prose passage compared to those who drank lemonade sweetened with the artificial sweetener saccharin (also known by the brand name of "Sweet'N Low"). Additionally, saccharin has no calories.
Glucose has also been shown to have a large impact on self-control and behavior, with limited supplies causing a quick falloff in behavioral stability at times. I like to call this phenomenon "hanger", hungry-anger, when observed in friends and loved ones.
(Reuters) - An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles travelling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics.
Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN particle physics centre on the Franco-Swiss border, told Reuters that measurements over three years showed the neutrinos moving 60 nanoseconds quicker than light over a distance of 730 km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy.
"We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them," he said.
If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light.
