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POPSThe Physical World as a Virtual Reality (by Brian Whitworth) The abstract continues: ... It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.
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POPS2008: Time to Change Your Mind Wonderful. Just think: you too could be a different person at the end of this sentence than you were at the beginning! May all our life sentences be write.
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POPSThinking the way animals do
Temple Grandin Ph.D. is an assistant professor of animal behaviour at Colorado State Uni. She suffers from a form of autism, and describes the way she thinks as thinking in pictures. This has helped her understand the way Animals think, with direct association, rather than a logical process. A significant statement which can apply to most people, is the fact that originally as far as she was aware everybody thought the same way. Until she asked people and found this was not the case. She describes a radio station person who said she had no pictures, in her mind, but thought in terms of emotions or words. I'm sure I can understand my dogs. They seem to think in a manner that is simple, and straightforward, it can just be a matter of associating cues with behavior, and remembering Pavlov. I think in Pictures and sounds. There is music I can 'hear' in my mind that not only has the same 'quality' as the original, but there is a remarkable capacity to edit. Perhaps something like Auti
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POPSNature Insight on Proteomics This Insight covers some of the most vibrant areas of research into the 'protein world', taking a journey from single protein dynamics to functional proteomics and drug discovery, through some of the latest technological developments in structural, cellular, evolutionary and computational biology.
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POPSCreationist vs. Atheist YouTube War Marks New Breed of Copyright Claim As more people catch on to how useful YouTube can be for delivering political, religious and cultural messages, DMCA claims are likely to increase. With news cycles moving at light-speed, an illegal copyright claim might well suppress unwanted news long enough to distort coverage. ... "Oscar Wilde once said that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about," Geller said. "When skeptics bring videos out, come on, that's free publicity ... I've been hounded by skeptics for years. I'm used to turning it around."
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POPSVarying Environments Can Speed Up Evolution Using computer simulations, we find that evolution toward goals that change over time can, in certain cases, dramatically speed up evolution compared with evolution toward a fixed goal. The highest speedup is found under modularly varying goals, in which goals change over time such that each new goal shares some of the subproblems with the previous goal. The speedup increases with the complexity of the goal: the harder the problem, the larger the speedup. Modularly varying goals seem to push populations away from local fitness maxima, and guide them toward evolvable and modular solutions. This study suggests that varying environments might significantly contribute to the speed of natural evolution.
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POPSHuman Knowledge-Foundations and Limits-Brian Holtz There are many more questions discussed, but there was enough room to provide some examples. He is asking the kinds of questions, that while profound, must be considered as answerable if we are to understand where we stand in the universe, and where we have the ability to go.
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POPSPropagandizing Islamic Creationism Mr. Yahya’s ideas “cast evolution as part of the corrupting influence of the West on Islamic culture, and that promotes a profound anti-science attitude that is certainly not going to help the Islamic world catch up to the West.” As the scientists ponder what to do with the book — for many, it is too beautiful for the trash bin but too erroneous for their shelves — they also speculate about the motives of its distributors.
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POPSSciTalks SciTalks collects talks and lectures by scientists on a variety of topics.
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