Spend enough time in the Arctic, and the featureless vista of white snow can eventually make you go blind. The reason is that if you stare into blank nothingness long enough, your brain shuts down your visual processing. Your eyes simply cease to carry the unchanging input. You may even start to hallucinate. It’s called … Continue reading “How noise in the brain is canceled by external noise”
From the moment the Jetsons’ robot maid, Rosie, smashed a pineapple upside down cake over Mr. Spacely’s head, I’ve looked forward to the day when humanoid housekeepers would inhabit our homes. But interacting with humans is harder work than it seems. So, we can forgive science for taking a bit of time with developing artificial … Continue reading “Humanoid housekeepers? Be prepared to wait”
A team of graduate students from KTH Royal Institute of Technology went to the Stockholm suburb of Kista last year to find out what 13- to 15-year-old boys think about books. Of the 38 boys they interviewed, only five said they had ever read a full book on their own—aside from the autobiography of Sweden’s … Continue reading “Pod offers immersion amid distractions”
Like the Duracell Bunny, the four Cluster spacecraft that ESA sent into space 15 years ago have continued working long after anyone expected them to. And in its extended lifespan, the mission has paid dividends. Over the last decade, transmissions of data from Cluster enabled a scientist at KTH Royal Institute of Technology to make … Continue reading “The space mission that keeps on going, and going …”
Physics researcher Egor Babaev speaks from experience when he tells his students that rejection can sometimes be taken as a form of compliment. His most influential paper, published in 2003 on the subject of superconductivity, was initially turned down by a number of journals on the grounds that its conclusions couldn’t be possible in principle. It … Continue reading “In science, rejection can be a compliment”
