There are so many optical illusions that feature an object or picture that can be seen in two different ways. But have you ever seen an illusion that can be interpreted in three different ways?

This remarkable illusion is called Three-fold cubes, and it was put together by Guy Wallis and David Lloyd from the University of Queensland, Australia. It was a recent candidate for Illusion of Year 2013.

This illusion, called Rotation Generated by Translation, was the overall winner:

Explanation:

This illusion concerns apparent rotation generated by pure translation. Square patterns consisting of four segments appear to rotate when they move straightly at a constant speed across the grid background. More surprisingly, the rotations in opposite directions can be generated by exactly the same square patterns. This illusion might be explained by well-known inchworm illusion; inchworm illusion arises at the four segments one after another resulting in the impression of rotation. This illusion is new in the sense that the rotation is generated by pure translation.

This one's neat, too:

Cartoonists are known to use multiple illustrative techniques to depict fast moving objects. In the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Show, for example, cartoonists drew multiple numbers of feet, usually streaky and blurred inside distorted loops under the cartoon characters’ torsos to symbolize rapid motion. Our illusion demonstrates that the perceived speed of objects can go twice as fast as their actual speed when objects getting blur while that are revolving rapidly in circular paths. This finding supports the view that the human brain uses many strategies to estimate speed of moving objects in the environment.

More.

Ever wondered what you'd look like as a Star Wars action figure? Well now's your chance. As a part of Disney's Hollywood Studios D-Tech Me Star Wars Weekends, visitors can get Stormtrooper replicas of themselves.

It'll cost you $99.95 and about 10 minutes of your time to get your face 3D scanned, but it would be totally worth it. A 7.5-inch model Stormtrooper is then generated by 3D printer, which will be delivered to your home about 7 to 8 weeks later.

Disney is only offering the experience during Star Wars Weekends 2013 (May 17th – 19th, May 24th – 26th, May 31st – June 2nd, and June 7th – 9th).

You can also get figurine of yourself locked in carbonite.

Via Design Taxi.

Illustrator Nickolay Lamm, along with astrobiologist Marilyn Vogel, have transplanted New York City to the various surfaces — and atmospheres — of our solar system's planets.

All images via Nickolay Lamm, Storage Front.

Mercury

Vogel writes:

Mercury has but a thin envelope of gas that barely qualifies as an atmosphere. The inexorable solar wind continually strips the planet of any gases that might be captured or retained by gravity. The tenuous atmosphere consists primarily of hydrogen making the atmosphere transparent to the darkness of space and the withering radiance of the nearby Sun. The solar wind interacts with the planet’s magnetic field to blast columns of dust and charged particles up into the atmosphere that then become a comet-like tail, evident as the sparkling haze shown in the upper atmosphere. The landscape is perforated with impact craters and covered in volcanic dust, similar to Earth's moon.

Venus

The yellowish envelope of hot, sulphurous air in Venus's CO2-rich atmosphere obscures the skyline. The surface is dry and covered by craters, lava, and sulphurous dust. But one thing this image doesn't capture is how the buildings would be absolutely crushed by the intense pressure on the surface. It's also doubtful that the sun could be seen at all.

Mars

NYC doesn't look half-bad on Mars — but watch out for those dust storms.

Jupiter

This one's a bit of a stretch seeing as it's a gas giant. Vogel writes:

[Jupiter's] atmosphere is so large and thick that the hydrogen and helium gas components condense into liquid, and even metallic forms near the base of the atmosphere. At around 100 km height above this liquid surface, the air has a similar air pressure to Earth’s atmosphere at the surface, but has a reducing chemistry that would burnish any metal surface, including that of the Statue of Liberty. The NYC skyline is depicted at this 100 km level, floating in the atmosphere. This area of Jupiter’s sky is a vast body of clear gaseous hydrogen. NYC is nestled between Jupiter's clouds of water, ammonia and sulfurous gases (the sallow clouds below) that sometimes converge into powerful thunderstorms (seen erupting below). Above the skyline hangs a yellow haze of hydrocarbons.

Saturn

Cloud city, anyone? This depiction also shows the city about 100 km above the surface with conditions very similar to that of Jupiter.

Uranus

Vogel writes:

Uranus is a cold gas giant that rotates perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. It has very high winds speeds at certain latitudes due to the uneven heating of its surface. These winds are faster than the most powerful hurricane on Earth and would thus obliterate structures like the Statue of Liberty. The atmosphere is primarily composed of hydrogen and helium with occasional clouds of methane and bands of hydrocarbon haze, shown as the horse tail clouds above the skyline. The atmosphere also contains a considerable fraction of methane, giving the air a beautiful aquamarine tint.

Neptune

The azure tint is created by Neptune's atmosphere of hydrogen and helium with traces of ammonia and water. This atmosphere is the coldest place in the solar system.

H/t Wired.

Our visions of the future tend to be forged in the pages of science fiction. But for the past half-century, a number of prominent thinkers, activists, and scientists have made significant contributions to our understanding of what the future could look like. Here are 10 recent futurists you absolutely need to know about.

Above image courtesy Dylan Cole.

A few months ago we told you about 9 historical figures who may have predicted our future. Now it’s time to focus on major contributions made during the past five decades.

Needless to say, there were dozens upon dozens of amazing futurists who could have been included in this article, so it wasn’t easy to pare down this list. But given the width and breadth of futurist discourse, we decided to select nine thinkers whose contributions should be considered seminal and highly influential to their field of study.

And as for any futurist I might have missed, please add to comments and let’s discuss! But let’s not get into futurists who are also scifi writers — that’s a separate list I’ll hit in the future.

1. Robert Ettinger

He’s known as the intellectual father of the cryonics movement. Physicist Robert Ettinger, who only died recently and is currently in cryonic stasis, was an early advocate of immortalism, or what we would today call radical life extension. In his 1964 book, The Prospect of Immortality, Ettinger argued that whole body or head-only freezing should be used to place the recently deceased into a state of suspended animation for later revival. To that end, he made the case that governments should immediately start a mass-freezing program. He also believed that the onset of immortality would endow humanity with a higher, nobler nature.

"Someday there will be some sort of psychological trigger that will move all these people to take the practical steps they have not yet taken,” he wrote, “When people realize that their children and grandchildren will enjoy indefinite life, that they may well be the last generation to die."

Today, organizations like Alcor and the Cryonics Institute (which he founded) have put his ideas into action.

Ettinger is also considered a pioneer in the transhumanist movement by virtue of his 1972 book, Man Into Superman.

Image: Christopher Barnatt/ExplainingTheFuture.

2. Shulamith Firestone

Back in 1970, at the tender age of 25, Shulamith Firestone kickstarted the cyberfeminist movement by virtue of her book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. To come up with her unique feminist philosophy, Firestone took 19th and 20th century socialist thinking and fused it with Freudian psychoanalysis and the existentialist perspectives of Simone de Beauvoir.

Firestone argued that gender inequality was the result of a patriarchal social structure that had been imposed upon women on account of their necessary role as incubators. She felt that pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing imposed physical, social, and psychological disadvantages upon women — and that the only way for women to free themselves from these biological impositions would be to seize control of reproduction. She advocated for the development of cybernetic and assistive reproductive technologies, including artificial wombs, gender selection, and in vitro fertilization. In addition, she advocated for the dissemination of contraception, abortion, and state support for child-rearing.

She would prove to be a major influence on later thinkers like Joanna Russ (author of "The Female Man"), sci-fi author Joan Slonczweski, and Donna Haraway (who we’ll get to in just a bit).

3. I. J. Good

British mathematician I. J. Good was one of the first thinkers — if not the first — to properly articulate the problem that is the pending Technological Singularity. Predating Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and Vernor Vinge by several decades, Good penned an article in 1965 warning about the dramatic potential for recursively improving artificial intelligence.

He wrote:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The phrase intelligence explosion has since been adopted by futurists critical of “soft” Singularity scenarios, like a slow takeoff event, or Kurzweilian notions of the steady, accelerating growth of all technologies (including intelligence). His work has influenced AI theorists like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ben Goertzel, and of course, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence).

Interestingly, Good served as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing during World War II. He also worked as a consultant on supercomputers for Stanley Kubrick for the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Image: Guardian.

4. K. Eric Drexler

Back in 1959, the renowned physicist Richard Feynman delivered an extraordinary lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in which he talked about the “experimental physics” of “manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.” This idea largely languished, probably because it was ahead of its time. It wouldn’t be until 1986 and the publication of K. Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology that the idea of molecular engineering would finally take root and take its modern form.

Drexler, by virtue of this book and his subsequent lectures and writings, was the first futurist to give coherency to the prospect of molecular nanotechnology. Given the potential for working at such a small scale, Drexler foresaw the rise of universal assemblers (also called molecular assemblers, or simply “fabs”) — machines that can build objects atom by atom (basically Star Trek replicators). He predicted that we’ll eventually use nanotech to clear the environment of toxins, grow rockets from a single seed, and create biocompatible robots that will be injected into our bodies. But unlike Robert Ettinger, Drexler actually came up with a viable technique for reanimating individuals in cryonic suspension; he envisioned fleets of molecular robots guided by sophisticated AI that would reconstruct a person thawed from liquid nitrogen.

But he also foresaw the negative consequences, such as weaponized nanotechnology and the potential for grey goo — an out-of-control scourge of self-replicating micro-machines.

As an aside, Drexler also predicted hypertext.

Image: New Scientist.

5. Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary is typically associated with drug culture and the phrase, "tune in, turn on, and drop out," but his contributions to futurism are just as significant — and surprisingly related. He developed his own futurist philosophy called S.M.I2.L.E, which stands for Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, and Life Extension. These ideas developed out of Leary’s life-long interest in seeing humanity evolve beyond its outdated morality, which would prove to be highly influential within certain segments of the transhumanist community.

As a futurist, Leary is also important in that he was an early advocate for cognitive liberty and potential for neurodiversity. Through his own brand of psychedelic futurism, he argued that we have the right to modify our minds and create our own psychological experiences. He believed that each psychological modality — no matter how bizarre or unconventional — could still be ascribed a certain value. What's more, given the extreme nature of certain psychedelic experiences, he also demonstrated the potential for human consciousness to function beyond what’s considered normal. More.

6. Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway made a name for herself after the publication of her 1984 essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” At the time, it was seen as a reaction to the rise of anti-technological ecofeminism, but it has since been interpreted and reinterpreted by everyone from postmodernist lefties through to transhumanist postgenderists.

Referring to Haraway as a Cyborgian Socialist-Feminist, the futurist and sociologist James Hughes describes her legacy this way:

Haraway argued that it was precisely in the eroding boundary between human beings and machines, and between women and machines in particular, that we can find liberation from the old patriarchal dualisms. Haraway says she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess, and proposes that the cyborg could be the liberatory mythos for women. This essay, and Haraway’s subsequent writings, have inspired a new cultural studies sub-discipline of “cyborgology,” made up of feminist culture and science fiction critics, exploring cyborgs and the woman-machine interface in various permutations.

And as Wired’s Hari Kunzru noted, “Sociologists and academics from around the world have taken her lead and come to the same conclusion about themselves. In terms of the general shift from thinking of individuals as isolated from the "world" to thinking of them as nodes on networks, the 1990s may well be remembered as the beginning of the cyborg era.”

7. Peter Singer

He’s primarily regarded as a philosopher, ethicist, and animal rights advocate, but Princeton’s Peter Singer has also made a significant impact to futurist discourse — albeit it through rather unconventional channels.

Singer, as a utilitarian, social progressive, and personhood-centered ethicist, has argued that the suffering of animals, especially apes and large mammals, should be put on par with the suffering of children and developmentally disabled adults. To that end, he founded the Great Ape Project, an initiative that seeks to confer basic legal rights to non-human great apes, namely chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. It’s a precursor to my own Rights of Non-Human Persons Program, which also includes dolphins, whales, elephants — and makes provisions for artificial intelligence. Singer has also suggested that chickens be genetically engineered so that they experience less suffering.

And in 2001, Singer’s A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation argued that there is a biological basis for human selfishness and hierarchy — one that has thwarted our attempts at egalitarian reform. What’s needed, says Singer, is the application of new genetic and neurological sciences to identify and modify the aspects of human nature that cause conflict and competition — what today would be regarded as moral enhancement. He supports voluntary genetic improvement, but rejects coercive eugenic pseudo-science.

Image: Guardian.

8. Freeman Dyson

Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson is one of the first thinkers to consider the potential for megascale engineering projects.

His 1959 paper, "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation," outlined a way for an advanced civilization to utilize all of the energy radiated by their sun — an idea that has since inspired other technologists to speculate about similar projects, like Matrioshka and J-Brains.

Image: JBIS.

9. Nick Bostrom

Swedish philosopher and neuroscientist Nick Bostrom is one of the finest futurists in the business, who is renowned for taking heady concepts to the next level. He has suggested, for example, that we may be living in a simulation, and that an artificial superintelligence may eventually take over the world — if not destroy us all together. And indeed, one of his primary concerns is in assessing the potential for existential risks. An advocate of transhumanism and human enhancement, he co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 (now Humanity+), and currently runs the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Image: Nick Bostrom.

10. Aubrey de Grey

Love him or hate him, gerontologist Aubrey de Grey has revolutionized the way we look at human aging.

He’s an advocate of radical life extension who believes that the application of advanced rejuvenation techniques may help many humans alive today live exceptionally long lives. What makes de Grey particularly unique is that he’s the first gerontologist to put together an actual action plan for combating aging; he’s one of the first thinkers to conceptualize aging as a disease unto itself. Rather than looking at the aging process as something that’s inexorable or overly complicated, his macro-approach (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) consists of a collection of proposed techniques that would work to not just rejuvenate the human body, but to stop aging altogether.

Back in 2006, MIT’s Technology Review offered $20,000 to any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that de Grey’s SENS is “so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate.” No one was able to claim the prize. But a 2005 EMBO report concluded that none of his therapies "has ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans." Regardless of the efficacy of de Grey’s approach, he represents the first generation of gerontologists to dedicate their work to the problem that is human aging. Moreover, he’s given voice to the burgeoning radical life extension movement.

As noted, I didn't want to include scifi writers.

Back when Drexler penned Engines he was primarily concerned with the grey goo scenario, to which he came up with the active shields concept. He's since toned down his fears about grey goo: http://www.crnano.org/PR-IOP.htm

As for the potential for pollution, Drexler has made it clear that nanotech will do more good for the environment than bad: http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/feb1/n...

Not sure how comfortable I'd be verbalizing every single little thing I'm doing or going to do. Much of this is probably going to seem weird at first.

An investigation is now underway after one of the largest Maya pyramids in Belize was bulldozed to extract materials for a road project.

Stuff like this drives me batty: The Ministry of Tourism and Culture in Belize is freaking out after the the Nohmul Complex was destroyed by construction workers to extract crushed rock for a road project. It's now investigating to find out how it happened, calling the wrecking of the ceremonial center "callous, ignorant, and unforgivable."

The Telegraph reports:

Cultural landmarks like Nohmul should be protected at all costs and the "disdain for our laws and policies is incomprehensible," the statement said.

Jaime Awe, who heads the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said yesterday that the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

Mr Awe said the destruction at complex in northern Belize was detected late last week.

Criminal charges could be levied pending the investigation.

More about Nohmul from Belize's National Institute of Culture and History.

Nohmul, meaning “Great Mound,” is 20 meters above sea level and is situated on a low, limestone ridge east of the Rio Hondo between Orange Walk and Corozal. Nohmul lies among sugarcane fields and is actually the highest landmark in the Orange Walk/ Corozal area. It is about a mile from the Northern Highway between San Pablo and San Jose...

...Nohmul was first occupied in the Middle Pre-Classic Period. Occupation of the site during the Late Pre-Classic Period was associated with the use of drained fields at Pulltrouser Swamp to the east of the center. By Early Classic times it is possible that the site functioned as a regional center, and that it governed much of the area around the modern communities of San Jose and San Pablo. During the Late Classic Period the site’s fortune waned and it was gradually abandoned. During the Terminal Classic/ Early Post-Classic the acropolis was re-used as a residential area. Today the ruins of Nohmul represent a major ceremonial center with twin ceremonial groups, ten plazas and a sacbe or raised causeway. There is at least one ballcourt. The main structure is a 50 by 52-meter structure that is 8 meters high. Unfortunately the site continues to be destroyed by road construction crews who bulldoze the mounds for gravel.

Images: Telegraph/AP.

Watching the guy use Glass on his bike made me worry about the visual multi-tasking aspect. More accidents? Will drivers even be allowed to use it?

Yes, I too would have the urge to practice the guitar while my dad is unconscious on the ground...

At least he had the sense to watch GoT.

Maybe for version 3.0: subvocal speech recognition.

A Toronto-based creative agency has put together its vision of what the next version of Google Glass might look like. There are some really neat ideas in there, but the video also feels a bit... off. What do you think?

The video was produced by Playground Inc. as a way to "visualize how heads up displays can affect our interactions with information, each other and the world." But why does it seem so weird and jarring?

After four years of service, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope has suffered a second serious malfunction — one that threatens to permanently end the mission. Controllers on the ground can no longer control its orientation. It looks bad, but NASA isn’t giving up hope.

This story actually began last July when one of Kepler’s four reaction wheels broke down. The spacecraft requires at least three functional wheels, so NASA was nervous about any further failures.

But on May 14th, as the Kepler Team went about its usual business of making contact with the space telescope, they found it in safe mode, slowing spinning about the sun-line.

And to their horror, they could not regain control of the spacecraft.

Further analysis revealed that yet another reaction wheel had failed. NASA thinks it’s an internal malfunction within the wheel, likely a structural failure of the wheel bearing.

Kepler has been returned to Thruster-Controlled Safe Mode as the Kepler team tries to figure out what to do. It can function in this state for several months, but given the seriousness of the situation, it’ll likely be put it into a deeper fuel-preserving stasis, called Point Rest State, which would extend its life to several years.

“We will take the next several days and weeks to assess our options and develop new command products,” noted the Kepler team through an official release. “These options are likely to include steps to attempt to recover wheel functionality and to investigate the utility of a hybrid mode, using both wheels and thrusters.”

But with the failure of the second wheel, Kepler will likely never return to the high pointing accuracy that enables its high-precision photometry.

Repairing Kepler in orbit is considered impossible.

While it’s heartbreaking, the $600 million Kepler space telescope had already completed its three-and-a-half year mission. Everything since November 2012 is a bonus. And indeed, the mission should be considered nothing less than a spectacular success. To date, it’s helped astronomers identify 132 exoplanets, including another 2,700 candidates. Owing to Kepler, astronomers now estimate that there may be as many as 17 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way.

Image: NASA/Kepler Mission.

Working at a depth of 1.5 miles, geoscientists have discovered an ancient and isolated reservoir that contains water estimated to be anywhere from 1.5 to 2.7 billion years old. It’s the oldest free-flowing sample of water ever discovered — and now the researchers want to know what’s in it.

The geoscientists are calling the discovery a game changer, and for good reason. Antarctica’s Lake Vostok, a massive body of water located about 2 miles below the surface, contains isolated water that’s millions of years old. And two years ago, water dated at tens of millions of years was found in a South African gold mine.

But this sample of free-flowing water could be billions of years old — anywhere from 1.5 to 2.64 billion years to be more precise. The Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old.

The discovery was made by researchers working at the bottom of a mine shaft located in Timmins, Ontario. It’s a part of Canada’s Precambrian Shield — the oldest part of North America’s crust. They found the water pouring out of boreholes at the bottom of the copper and zinc mine. The researchers say that no source of free-flowing water could have passed through the cracks or pores to contaminate it.

It’s a pure sample — and its chemical composition is giving the researchers a glimpse into what Earth’s atmosphere was like during our planet's primordial era. But not only that, it could offer some clues about the Earth’s early potential for habitability.

According to the geoscientists, a team that included the University of Toronto’s Barbara Sherwood Lollar, the water contains enough energy to support life (including high levels of methane and hydrogen). They don’t know if there’s actual life in it — but the researchers say the water holds the potential.

The geoscientists will continue to study the sample to get a better fix on its composition and to determine whether or not it contains microbial life.

But it seems that the deep Earth isn’t as sterile a place as it’s made out to be. This research has implications to our understanding of not just life on Earth, but other planets as well. Interestingly, the Martian crust is similar to the Canadian Shield, which also contains crystalline rock that’s billions of years old — and possibly water.

Read the entire study at Nature: "Deep fracture fluids isolated in the crust since the Precambrian era."

Images: Barbara Sherwood Loller, J. Moran.

Game changer in the sense that water this old has never been analyzed for habitability, offering unprecedented clues about Earth's early atmosphere and potential to foster life.

After just five days of non-invasive brain stimulation and a bit of cognitive training, researchers at Oxford University were able to enhance people's high-level abilities, such as mental arithmetic and manual calculations. And remarkably, the effect lasts for months.

The discovery was made by scientists working at Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology, and it could lead to entirely new education strategies. But more immediately, it could also help people with learning disabilities or neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. We contacted the lead researcher to learn more.

Non-invasive, painless and cheap

It’s called transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) and it’s only been around for a few years. It works by enhancing the excitability of the brain, and it does so by applying random electrical noise to target regions of the cortex via stimulation electrodes placed on the surface of the scalp.

“tRNS has only emerged relatively recently, so how the technique influences the excitability of individual neurons is still somewhat of a mystery,” researcher Roi Cohen Kadosh tells io9. “On a more macroscopic level, it is thought that tRNS may increase neuronal firing synchronization within stimulated regions of the cortex.” And in fact, neuroimaging results suggests that tRNS increases the efficiency with which stimulated brain areas use their supplies of oxygen and nutrients.

What’s more, the technique is non-invasive, painless, and relatively cheap. You can get one from these people, as a matter of fact.

It’s also different from other similar stimulation techniques in two main ways.

“First, it is less perceptible than the more-common transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), so subjects are less aware they are being stimulated,” Cohen Kadosh tells io9. “Second, you can apply TRNS in a polarity-independent fashion, meaning there are no 'positive' or ‘negative’ electrodes to worry about.”

Cohen Kadosh and his team reasoned that tRNS can be used to enhance the functioning of brain regions that are involved in math learning and performance. And indeed, previous studies showed that it can improve working memory — a major benefit when doing math.

Inducing neuroplastic effects

To that end, the researchers performed a study in which tRNS would be used to stimulate the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) — a key area involved in arithmetic. The team recruited 25 volunteers (some of which were put into a control, or “sham”, group) and applied the electrical signal to their scalps for 20 minutes.

In conjunction with this, the participants were trained on two types of cognitive tasks: calculations (which involved complex arithmetic tasks) and drills (math tasks that required the use of working memory).

This, along with the tRNS, went on for five consecutive days.

Once complete, subsequent tests showed that the tRNS and cognitive training enhanced the speed of both calculation and memory-recall-based arithmetic learning. But not only that, tests conducted six months later revealed long-lasting behavioral and physiological changes in the stimulated group.

Integrating neuroscience and education

“If experimental results continue in this positive direction, we hope that these simulation techniques will one-day be used in the clinic, classrooms and even home to help those who struggle with certain cognitive tasks,” Cohen Kadosh told us. “This could include anyone from a child falling behind in their math class to an elderly patient suffering from neurodegenerative disease.”

That said, Cohen Kadosh said it may be some time before we see these techniques transferred to the clinic and classroom — but he sees it as a realistic aim.

“Several socio-ethical, financial and scientific barriers need to be overcome before it can be achieved,” he says. “Nevertheless the current results open up a new line of study that will hopefully extend our findings into a larger and more diverse set of subjects, in more natural setting such as a classroom or study-group.”

Looking ahead, Cohen Kadosh sees an integration of neuroscience and education — a potent combination that he feels will help individuals reach their cognitive potential in math and other fields.

You can read the entire study in Current Biology: “Long-Term Enhancement of Brain Function and Cognition Using Cognitive Training and Brain Stimulation.”

Images: Michelangelus/Shutterstock, Roi Cohen Kadosh, Rogue Resolutions.

Caffeine: Is there anything it can't do?

The concerns about human cloning are grossly overstated, imo. I honestly can't see the harm in it, so long as the cloned children are born into a loving, caring family. I also think very few people will opt into it should it ever becomes legal — so it's kind of a non-issue. And as for its potential to somehow de-value life, that's a load of crap. It's the same sort of hysteria that surrounded IVF when it first emerged, and now no one questions it.

It’s a major scientific breakthrough, and it could lead to new treatments for diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes — but this development also takes us one step closer to human reproductive cloning. The howls of outrage have already begun.

This achievement is literally 16 years in the making. Ever since Dolly the sheep was cloned via somatic cell nuclear transfer, scientists have wondered if a similar technique could be used to produce human embryonic stem cells. Now, researchers at Oregon Health and Science University have figured it out.

A major impetus behind the research was the desire to create undifferentiated stem cells that wouldn't be rejected by a recipient's own immune system. To achieve this, a research team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov removed the DNA from donated unfertilized human eggs and inserted them with skin cells extracted from a human adult. After coaxing them with precisely-timed electronic pulses, an inactivated virus, and a chemical bath (which included a bit of caffeine), the cells began to divide — a viable colony was born.

It’s a breakthrough that will eventually lead to therapeutic cloning in which patient-specific lines of embryonic stem cells can be generated. In future, these stem cells will be used to help a patient restore his or her own tissue, like heart cells or other bioengineered organs.

It should be noted that the researchers did not plant their human embryos. What’s more, they say the technique can’t lead to the birth of a viable baby.

But as Andrew Pollack from The New York Times notes, “Nonetheless, the fact that the scientists were able to get cloned human embryos to survive long enough for stem cell extraction is likely to be seen as a step on the way to human reproductive cloning.”

He notes the concern:

The Conference of Catholic Bishops, for instance, said Wednesday that the research “will be taken up by those who want to produce cloned children as ‘copies’ of other people.”

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston said human cloning was immoral, even if used for therapeutic purposes, because it “treats human being as products, manufactured to order to suit other people’s wishes.”

Similarly, Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for National Catholic Bioethics Center, called the approach unethical, noting that “It involves the decision to utilize early human beings as repositories for obtaining desired cells. You’re creating them only to destroy them.”

All this said, the breakthrough may be on the late side. Scientists can now use adult skin cells to create a stem cell very similar to embryonic cells, but without the need for embryos — thus making it a more ethically palatable option.

Read the entire study at Cell: "Human Embryonic Stem Cells Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer."

Images: Oregon Health and Science University.