Current Events 7

Smart People Sleep Late
Author: bluemana
Date Written: 7/11/2010
http://www.disinfo.com/2010/11/smart-people-sleep-late/

People that have higher intelligence quotients tend to go to sleep later than those with lower intelligence quotients.  This is becuase the "smarter" tend to have a higher nocturnal activity, which means that they are more active at night, which results with them going to sleep later than other people. We are still not sure chat the exact effect of sleeping is but we have seen many bad effects of the lack of sleep such as: high blood pressure, obesity, shorter life spans and drowsiness. These are all negative effects. For example 37% of car crashes are caused by drivers that are drowny and body chemistry can be effected by even small sleeping problems. According to Juliette Faraco of Stanford University, sleep los can cause a strong need for “sleep rebound”.According to other studies, sleeping habits are also closely related to academic achievementsof students.According to another research by Satoshi Kanazawa, people with a higher IQ tend to be more of „night owls“ while peole with a lower IQ tend to have to do their work during daytime.

I personally find this interesting. I know a lot of people who really tend to be „night owls,“ like myself, but aren’t really geniuses.I guess that could be somehow related to all those hormones in a teenager’s body or also the „coolness“ of going to sleep late. It goes the samet he other way around. Some of the smartest people I know go to bed really early but I guess that might be a habit forced by the family.

Current Events 6

Cosmic Rebirth

Author: Ron Cowen

Date Written: 18/12/2010 (?)

Link: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/66525/title/Cosmic_rebirth

The big bang as we know it happened about 13.7 million years ago, however according to a new study the universe could be much older than that, eons older. This is because it could be only the latest part of a series of multiple big bangs. This theory by  a theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia. It is based on their findings of round patter in the microwave background of space. These circles show where the temperature is slightly different from the rest of the space. This supports the new theory as an inflatable universe shown in currently generally accepted theories could hardly create them and would most likely erase them. Those circles should be a slight look back at the big bangs that came before the most recent one. They found similar circular patterns with two different machines which lowers the possibility of them being wrong or being fooled by a faulty machine. The results of this study are not necessarily perfectly reliable but currently a new map of the cosmic microwave background is in the works. This could tell us more about how reliable this theory really is.
I personally find this very interesting. The possibility of us being wrong about the big bang is possible. As history has proven, we are often wrong. The question is: What came before the first big bang of the series?                                                                                                                                

Current Events 5

The Brain Controlled RatCar, or the First Still From the Live Action Pinky and the Brain Movie

Author: Kyle VanHemert

Date Written: 4/10/10

Link: http://gizmodo.com/5655459/the-brain+controlled-ratcar-or-the-first-still-from-the-live-action-pinky-and-the-brain-movie

A group of researchers at Tokyo university have made a device which they call the "RatCar". It works thanks to electordes which they have planted right into the motor cortex of the rats. It was hard to teach to rodents to use the RatCar. First they had to have the rats run around with the vehicle attached to them but with the engine turned off. They placed sensors on both the rats and the cars. Then they observed those and programmed the cars to respond accordingly. Then six out of eight rats were able to control the RatCars. Unforunetaly the question still remains how much control the rats actually have over the RatCars. 

This could be a pretty cool invention especially if it gets used on people in the future.  But as I mentioned, these devices haven't necessarily been proved to work as hoped and need to be tested and improved more.