Singularity University which is a private university dedicated to speeding education in science and technology is giving away about 50k in cash and services to startups pursuing the new field of synthetic biology to help solve major projects including energy, healthcare.
Loop moving in magnetic field (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Recently I’ve become aware of more and more concern about the electromagnetic soup we are embedded in from all of our various gadgets. While Europe has taken a much more cautious approach on this, the USA as always, has let free enterprise rule. Here is a fairly balanced Wiki article on this topic. Needless to say, I am now taking precautions to minimize my exposure but still maintain my connections which I require for business.
English: The content of tweets on Twitter, based on the data gathered by Pear Analytics in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Most adults I know dismissed Twitter, with only 140 characters at their disposal, as a waste of time just a year ago. But after the Iranian revolts, the Arab Spring and the London riots in which Twitter played a key part, it is not so easily dismissed anymore. But its seemingly brief and trivial nature is now proving to be its key advantage: it provides a constant thermometer of public sentiment with a time stamp and tidy little packaging. Just as molecular biology has allowed us to reduce physical life to traceable and analyzable bits ready for computers to digest, so is Twitter creating those bits out of our social experience. And this is the realm of anthropology.
One recent article examines several Cornellsocial scientists who are doing just that, analyzing 509 million tweets, gathered between February 2008 and January 2010, using linguistic software to score their positivity based on word choices. The noted a mood timeline for 2.4 million individuals from 84 countries, and noted that happiness has a peak in the morning (see graph below from their website, http://timeu.se/) before the typical workday begins, and then fades as the day progresses, only to climb again late in the day. Rather be due to work (as one would expect) they suggest it is due to biology since it occurs on weekends as well (explaining our love of sleeping in, as it delays the high).
Recently a YouTube video explaining the biochemistry of sugar has elevated public awareness of thousands of Americans enough to question heir intake. Much of the research, this speaker notes, points to sugar as a direct toxin, including more recent discoveries on its effect on insulin signaling and cancer. Of course anthropologists have long documented the many impacts of sugar, from colonization of whole populations to the rise in diseases of civilization resulting from the Western diet but this increased awareness by a gifted speaker and clinician is a welcome one.
One of several versions of the painting “The Scream”. The National Gallery, Oslo, Norway. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Cities have been the engines of civilization for millennia, serving as places where the arts, commerce, and ideas flourish. But as we are reminded in a recent article, the close social interactions that make a city so productive also proved ideal for tuberculosis, measles, the plague, and many other diseases. In European capitals, circa 1800, deaths exceeded births; these cities only grew because of the influx of people from the countryside. An average man in 19th-century Paris was physically shorter than his rural counterpart. Today, the physical threats of cities are being exceeded by mental ones. People living in an urban setting are 21 percent more likely to experience an anxiety disorder, and 39 percent more likely to experience mood disorders. City life roughly doubles the chances a person will suffer from schizophrenia, and this threat increases with time in cities, like the effect of an accumulating toxin. The article notes that German scientists have found, for the first time, the specific structures in the brain affected by city life. Using brain scanners, they demonstrated that people who lived in cities showed a greater stress response in the amygdala, a brain area that processes emotions. And a second structure, which helps regulate the amygdala, showed a heightened stress response in people who were raised in cities, according to a report in the journal Nature.
The discovery suggests a specific mechanism by which cities, with their steady stress, might unbalance parts of the mind. Scientists can now look at particular aspects of urban design — a particular layout of streets, say, or the preponderance of straight lines — to see which ones cause the signature brain changes. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, one of the German scientists who led the research, says he has already begun to look into just these sorts of questions.
I really like this guy’s stuff. A self proclaimed “energy anthropologist” this video artist travelled deep into South America to find a primal, invisible forms of energy which he documented. Juan Downey, like all the best avant-gardists going right back to the 19th century, had a utopian streak. He spent seven years traveling back and forth between the United States and South America, where he visited isolated communities in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, recording aspects of daily life with a video camera, then playing his recordings back to other communities. In 1976 and ’77, Downey took his wife, Marilys, and his stepdaughter, Elizabeth (Titi), deep into the Amazon. From the Guahibos in Central Orinoco, they canoed upriver to Mavaca and Tayari ,where for half a year they lived among the Yanomami people. Downey documented their lives. He became fascinated in particular by a structure, the “shabono,’’ made from thatched palm leaves or wood and with a hole in the middle, that could shelter several hundred people.
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