Category: ideas

A Russian neurophysiologist “is exploring the idea that people with Alzheimer’s disease could be treated by drilling a hole in their skull. In fact, he is so convinced of the benefits of trepanation that he claims it may help anyone from their mid-40s onwards to slow or even reverse the process of age-related cognitive decline. Can he be serious?”

“Ryoma Igarashi likes going for long drives through the mountains, taking photographs of Buddhist temples and exploring old neighborhoods. He’s just taken up gardening, growing radishes in a planter in his apartment.” This sort of 20-something male would be completely unremarkable in Seattle or Munich. But in Japan, these “soushoku danshi” (literally, “grass-eating boys”) are precipitating a national debate about masculinity.

“It was the mythical supersleep, deeper than any other, the Atlantis of the unconscious. It was a heavy dose of what scientists call slow-wave sleep. I’ve been trying to find it again ever since – but the question is, where?”

Researchers “found that engineers are three to four times as likely as other graduates to be present among the members of violent Islamic groups in the Muslim world since the 1970s. … The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12 economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences.”

“So called ‘carpet cloaks’ are the first technology to succeed in hiding objects by deflecting light across a range of wavelengths. Invisibility cloaks work by deflecting light waves so the light that reaches the eye shows no trace of the hidden object.”

“It may be true, in fact, that complex networks such as financial systems face an inescapable trade-off – between size and efficiency on one hand, and global stability on the other. Once they have been assembled, in other words, globally interconnected and integrated financial networks just may be too complex to prevent crises like the current one from reoccurring.”

“The idea first took hold among a generation of economists repelled by the heavy government oversight of financial markets imposed during the New Deal era and by evidence of widespread irrational behaviour by participants in these markets. At the same time they were excited by the advances in mathematical economics and the computing power that allowed market data to be analysed like never before.”

“So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student in library and information science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who revealed yesterday on The Scholarly Kitchen blog that he got a nonsensical computer-generated paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.”

At the second annual World Science Festival in New York this weekend, “the curious will have to make painful choices: [for instance,] attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost mural by Leonardo Da Vinci at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”