Image credit: CERN for the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations
Image credit: CERN for the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations
My latest work connects basic research in neuroscience with psychobiology, clinical diagnostic, and therapeutic insights. With my colleagues, we show how cognition balances sensory processing.
Positive psychology recognizes the close relationship between social climate and resource availability. The social environment is an excellent determinant of the
mindset of behavior in animals and people. In the late nineteenth century, the Russian scientist Peter
Kropotkin found that species from
bacteria and fish to mammals and birds lean toward generosity and
cooperation when faced with abundance. From ants and bees to falcons,
swallows, gazelles, and buffalos, as well as herds of wild horses, tribes of
dogs, wolf packs, and communities of people form cooperation and generosity
when faced with biological richness and supply abundance. Positive environments encourage generosity and cooperation by supporting security, trust, and confidence. Desirable population structures promote cooperation.
However, when the reduction of supplies reaches a tipping point, generosity disappears. Defections sweep through the population, the lack of resources inflicts a cognitive burden, which negatively affects IQ. The poor's lack of generosity originates in mental exhaustion rather than personality defects. The above considerations also might explain poverty’s role in negative personality transformations. Conspiracy theories, terrorism, and crime reflect the wide-spread distrust in governments, public institutions, and even science. We propose that the loss of a degree of freedom occurs through distrust. Therefore, interventions to provide basic social safety effectively raise the human race's overall cognitive performance.
Read the whole article in Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal
Entanglement is a link between two sister particles or objects, making them behave as a single entity. Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, entangled a mechanical oscillator—a vibrating dielectric membrane—with an atom cloud's spin (magnetic orientation). These very different entities were possible to entangle by connecting them with photons, particles of light. Atoms can be useful in processing quantum information, and the membrane—or mechanical quantum systems in general—can be useful for the storage of quantum information.
Professor Eugene Polzik, who led the effort, states that: "With this new technique, we are on route to pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of entanglement. The bigger the objects, the further apart they are, . . . the more interesting entanglement becomes from both fundamental and applied perspectives. With the new result, entanglement between very different objects has become possible."
The experiment might be a step towards limitless precision of measurements of motion.Read the whole article in Phys.org