Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

This is in support of the Penny 4 NASA project. If you enjoy anything you learned from this thread, consider making a donation and signing the petition.

http://www.penny4nasa.org/

Why should I care?:

[Mr_Tomahawk]

Your mom.

[Fish]

[Inmem58]

**** you moon

[Fish]

[Dave Lane]

.

[Fish]

If you have time to kill... watch this ****ing documentary about the Mantis Shrimp, aka the Ninja Shrimp. One of the most fascinating crazy creatures I've learned about in quite a while. Seriously worth 45 minutes...

[Sofa King]

Originally Posted by KC Fish

If you have time to kill... watch this ****ing documentary about the Mantis Shrimp, aka the Ninja Shrimp. One of the most fascinating crazy creatures I've learned about in quite a while. Seriously worth 45 minutes...

I skipped to the middle of that movie.

I laughed out loud at 13:49 in that movie. hilarious.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Sofa King

I skipped to the middle of that movie.

I laughed out loud at 13:49 in that movie. hilarious.

.... you would....

[Fish]

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives

After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain.

That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past.

“It’s amazing,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva, codirector of the UCLA Integrative Center for Learning and Memory. “For the last hundred years, scientists have been looking for the engram in the brain. We have now gotten to the point that we know enough about memory and how memories are formed that we can actually find the engram, and by finding it, we can manipulate it.”

The implications of that finding hold promise for the treatment of human memory disorders. On the one hand, it points the way toward the selective targeting of neurons that hold memories of events so traumatic that people are disabled by them. That violent attack that you cannot get over? Deactivate those neurons in the amygdala that are linked to it, and you might still remember the attack but be freed from the unbearable pall of fear. With 3.5 percent of U.S. adults estimated to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over the course of a given year, an effective new treatment would mark a mental-health milestone.

While PTSD sufferers remember too well, those with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia suffer the opposite problem. And just as Silva and others studying engrams have demonstrated the ability to delete memories, they have also shown they can strengthen them. This past July Silva’s colleague Sheena Josselyn, a neurobiologist at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, reported that her lab improved memory in mice bred to have the equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Using the same tools effective in creating and then purging fear, she boosted an entire brain region, the hippocampus, known to be critical for forming long-term memories.

Offering up what he concedes is a “science fiction kind of idea,” Silva wonders if physicians treating patients with Alzheimer’s “could direct memories to those regions of the brain that remain strong. Especially in neurodegenerative disorders, you have parts of the brain that are healthy and others that are not. If we find strategies to funnel memories to those parts that are still intact, we may be able to extend function longer.”

More in the link....

[notorious]

[Fish]

Why Nikola Tesla was the coolest Geek ever to live. AKA, what I bet you didn't know about Nikola Tesla, and what you thought you knew about Thomas ****ing Edison:

[Dr. Facebook Fever]

His band did some cool shit too.

[Lzen]

Originally Posted by KC Fish

Why Nikola Tesla was the coolest Geek ever to live. AKA, what I bet you didn't know about Nikola Tesla, and what you thought you knew about Thomas ****ing Edison:

Wow, that's quite interesting. I knew about Tesla but didn't realize he did all of that. And I didn't know the truth about Edison. Is all of this, in fact, true?

[Fish]

Originally Posted by Lzen

Wow, that's quite interesting. I knew about Tesla but didn't realize he did all of that. And I didn't know the truth about Edison. Is all of this, in fact, true?

Yup. Tesla is one of the most fascinating people I've ever read about. His list of "Did you know" facts is just astonishing....

A couple more:

In 1886, Tesla persuaded investors to fund the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing Company. Tesla invented a revolutionary arc lamp and the company made money. The investors then promptly reaped the profits and fired Tesla, who was forced into manual labor to survive.

Although Tesla demonstrated his invention of the radio in 1893 and received a patent for it, the patent office stripped the award in 1904 and gave it instead to Guglielmo Marconi. Since both Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie had invested in Marconi and not in Tesla. Tesla fought for 29 years to reacquire his patent, finally getting a hearing in the US Supreme Court. With finding that 15 of Marconi's 16 patents were actually invented by Tesla himself, the court rules in Tesla's favor in 1944 – a year after his death.

When inventor George Washington Carver’s paintings were displayed at the 1893 World's Fair Exposition, they were lit using Tesla's AC power – although Edison refused to allow use of his light bulbs.

In order to keep electricity inexpensive to the public, Tesla sold George Westinghouse his own royalties, which were worth $12 million, for just $216,000. If Tesla had kept his royalties, he may have been the first billionaire, sharing financial history with the likes of John D. Rockefeller the worlds first in 1916, Howard Hughes, and Bill Gates who became the first man to reach $100 billion in 1999.

Tesla and the great storyteller, Mark Twain, were very close friends.

He claimed to have designed a death ray – or "peace ray,"(See... I wasn't joking. ) as he preferred – that could electrocute an approaching army completely at a distance of 200 miles.

Tesla adorned the cover of Time Magazine in 1931, and was praised by Albert Einstein as "an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents..."

In 1928 he received his last patent, which was a forerunner to the modern day helicopter, which was initially conceived of by Leonardo da Vinci. In his lifetime some have stated that he had applied for 840 patents and received 700. What can be found is that he has 112 US Patents and 34 International Patents. Regardless, he was known as the Father of Radio, Television, Power Transmission, and the Induction Motor.

Nikola Tesla's Death:

On January 7, 1943: Tesla died penniless and alone in room #3327 of the Hotel New Yorker. Soon after his death, the United States Government (with the help of the FBI) seized all of his research materials and writings, most of which never again reappeared.