Dölen, who recently made headlines for her work giving MDMA to octopuses, would love to see neuroscientists band together to create a periodic table of the brain. Attempts to create general rules for how certain brain properties can predict intelligence often fall apart, Dölen explained. This huge data set also allows them to look at relationships between neuron number and intelligence, longevity, senility, sociality, etc.”
Dölen compared these insights to the comparative approaches behind the periodic table—once you find the proper patterns and line everything up, the table itself can make predictions. Dölen hopes a massive catalog of the properties of as many brains from as many species as possible, arranged in some pre-determined order, will reveal revolutionary insights about how brains work.

Self-deception belongs to a family of concepts involving psychological manipulation, such as wishful thinking, repression, denial and dissociation (emotionally removing oneself from a traumatic experience to avoid confronting it). Strategies of postponement and misrepresentation allow us to conceal our true nature even from ourselves
Somewhere on the scale between extremely damaging and totally insignificant self-deception we find examples that resonate. Skeptics about self-deception claim that any genuine examples would need to satisfy impossible conditions, such as the knowing-dupe or the contradictory belief conditions. For the skeptic’s defeat we must show either: (1) that the fact of somebody holding inconsistent beliefs is reconcilable with the idea of a unified centre of conscious beliefs; or (2) that the skeptic misconstrues the conditions under which self-deception occurs.

In 1919 Edward Rosenow from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, isolated several bacteria from the sputum and lungs of flu patients in Rochester, formulated a vaccine that contained five different kinds of bacteria, and doled it out to 100,000 people. For the first several years the influenza vaccine contained only one strain, the influenza A virus, because, as far as anyone knew, that was the only kind of influenza out there. For the 2016-7 flu season, most of the vaccine doses manufactured in the US targeted four different strains. One study compared 18 different groups over 10 influenza seasons and found that the vaccine reduced the overall winter mortality rate in older people by an astonishing 50%.

At first glance, the hagfish—a sinuous, tubular animal with pink-grey skin and a paddle-shaped tail—looks very much like an eel. Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions—readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously. Typically, a hagfish will release less than a teaspoon of gunk from the 100 or so slime glands that line its flanks. But try to lift your hand out, and it’s as if the bucket’s contents are now attached to you.

The pivotal moment in Pacific archaeological history happened in 1952, when a team of researchers found a cache of dentate-stamped pots at a place called Lapita in New Caledonia, a French collectivity to the southwest of Vanuatu. Along the way, they encountered populations of “Papuans” — a generic shorthand for highly distinct groups of people who had been in the Papua New Guinea region for 40,000 years. Finally, the people now associated with Lapita sailed into the blankness of the open ocean for the first time, crossing the Remote Oceania divide to Vanuatu and, from there, outward to the farthest reaches of the Pacific. Archaeologists differed, often bitterly, on the details, but as Reich describes it in his book, the prevailing opinion was that “the Lapita archaeological culture was forged during a period of intense exchange between people ultimately originating in the farming center of China (via Taiwan) and New Guineans.”

A study published January 3 in Nature Communications provides new evidence that, rather than releasing seismic tensions in the crust, the 2015 quake likely loaded the surrounding region for an even more destructive mega-earthquake, which could clock in at magnitudes of 8.5 or higher. Earthquakes in the Himalaya, however, present a curious puzzle: “When you look at the historical seismicity, it looks like you don’t have enough earthquakes to balance the energy that is accumulating because of this loading,” says Caltech’s Jean-Philippe Avouac, coauthor of the new study. Each moderate quake therefore builds up energy, eventually leading to a megaquake that cracks through to the surface once every 500 or 600 years, finally relaxing the region’s built-up strain. Only two Himalayan earthquakes in the past 500 years have definitely ruptured to the surface, one in 1934 and another in 1950, explains Roger Bilham, lead author of the 2017 study.

Building on work done by physicist Amos Ori two decades prior, and armed with her strong computational skills, Mallary built a computer model that would capture most of the essential physical effects on a spacecraft, or any large object, falling into a large, rotating black hole like Sagittarius A*. What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole’s so-called inner horizon singularity. Mallary also discovered a feature that was not fully appreciated before: the fact that the effects of the singularity in the context of a rotating black hole would result in rapidly increasing cycles of stretching and squeezing on the spacecraft. Mallary’s approach of using a computer simulation to examine the effects of a black hole on an object is very common in the field of black hole physics.

But the work of image examiners has never had a strong scientific foundation, and the FBI’s endorsement of the unit’s findings as trial evidence troubles many experts and raises anew questions about the role of the FBI Laboratory as a standard-setter in forensic science. The work of image examiners is a type of pattern analysis, a category of forensic science that has repeatedly led to misidentifications at the FBI and other crime laboratories. The problems with the FBI’s photo comparison work plague other subjective types of forensic science, such as fingerprint analysis, microscopic hair fiber examination and handwriting analysis, said Itiel Dror, a neuroscientist who trains U.S. law enforcement on cognitive bias in crime laboratories. (FBI Forensic Audio, Video and Image Analysis Unit, via Wilbert McKreith)

Prosecutors had presented jurors with days of circumstantial evidence against the ex-convict, Wilbert McKreith, before Vorder Bruegge took the stand.

In 2015, the FDA revised its controversial ban, announcing that gay and bisexual men can donate blood if they abstain from sex with men for a full year—a condition heterosexual donors and LGBTQ women don’t have to meet. Contextualized in a science-centric show that explores how disease affects New York City’s communities, Blood Mirror highlights how “there’s essentially an FDA-imposed quarantine on gay people,” Eagles says. In his artist’s statement for the sculpture, he cites a 2014 UCLA Williams Institute study, which estimated that lifting the ban on men who have sex with men would increase the total annual blood supply in the US by two to four percent, and could be used to help save the lives of more than a million people. New work by Jordan Eagles, based off a 1994 HULK comic called “In the Shadow of AIDS,” and paired with blood from an HIV+ undetectable donor and a donor on PrEP.

When heated, propylene glycol produces a smoke-like vapor, which means this ingredient is responsible for the sick clouds that you create while smoking your Juul. Needless to say, nicotine is the ingredient responsible for everyone becoming addicted to Juuling: One recently published government survey found that 1.3 million more teens vaped in 2018 than the year prior, and the popularity of Juul certainly seems to be responsible. 6) Benzoic Acid: Benzoic acid is widely used as a food preservative; however, it can also be used to increase the potency of nicotine without adding even more nicotine — which is exactly why it can be found in Juul pods. Unfortunately, some studies have found the benzoic acid found in Juul pods can be carcinogenic; however, others have refuted this claim.