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POPSThe Future of Gaming I have tried to capture some hints about the future of gaming. As the author remarks: "For now, the only way to predict the future of gaming is to predict that all predictions will be wrong." Yet, it seems that in the not so far future, games are going to deeply affect the way we perceive our world. Especially the younger generations will be affected, and to some extent it is already happening. It seems that eventually games will not only affect our perception of the world, they WILL become a substantial part of our world.
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POPSSun + Water = Fuel Michael Grätzel, however, may have a clever way to turn Nocera's discovery to practical use. A professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was one of the first people Nocera told about his new catalyst. "He was so excited," Grätzel says. "He took me to a restaurant and bought a tremendously expensive bottle of wine." In 1991, Grätzel invented a promising new type of solar cell. It uses a dye containing ruthenium, which acts much like the chlorophyll in a plant, absorbing light and releasing electrons. In Grätzel's solar cell, however, the electrons don't set off a water-splitting reaction. Instead, they're collected by a film of titanium dioxide and directed through an external circuit, generating electricity. Grätzel now thinks that he can integrate his solar cell and Nocera's catalyst into a single device that captures the energy from sunlight and uses it to split water.
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POPSBecoming immortal A very interesting read! Of course, what are we going to do with eternity is not a medical question but rather philosophical and emotional. At least we will have time enough for love... For the quasi immortal humans of the future, nothing in this existence will look even remotely similar to the way we see things today.
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POPSMind-blowing Examples of Photo Manipulation Art Photo manipulation is one of the most creative artforms to come out of the digital age. Here we showcase ten masters of this technique and 48 examples of their stunning artwork, blending real photos with synthetic elements for a surreal result.
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POPSCould an Acid Trip Help to overcome anxiety ? This is an important article. I believe that psychedelic drugs not only have highly valuable therapeutic properties, but they can serve when responsibly used, to expand one's consciousness and boost intelligence and creativity in many aspects of life. The use of psychedelic drugs is one of those case where something which is highly beneficial to the individual is arbitrarily banned by the 'system' because the system do not want us too conscious, or too creative, not even too intelligence. All these threat the stability of the system while promoting independent thought. It is worth mentioning that the family of psychedelic drugs DO NOT contain dangerous addicting drugs such as opium, heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, etc.
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POPSThe Teen Brain Human and animal studies, Jensen and Urion note, have shown that the brain grows and changes continually in young people—and that it is only about 80 percent developed in adolescents. The largest part, the cortex, is divided into lobes that mature from back to front. The last section to connect is the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive processes such as reasoning, planning, and judgment. Normally this mental merger is not completed until somewhere between ages 25 and 30—much later than these two neurologists were taught in medical school. There are also gender differences in brain development. As Urion and Jensen explain, the part of our brain that processes information expands during childhood and then begins to thin, peaking in girls at roughly 12 to 14 years old and in boys about two years later. This suggests that girls and boys may be ready to absorb challenging material at different stages, and that schools may be missing opportunities to reach them.
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POPSMe, Myself and I The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalized, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries. So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” — or any other pronoun — had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you.”
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POPSSeeing in four dimensions The videos are all available free at www.dimensions-math.org. The videos go on to show how we can visualize imaginary numbers geometrically, how fractal patterns emerge in the Mandelbrot set and Julia sets, and how beautiful and complex shapes can be built up from circles.
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POPSComplex decision? Don't sleep on it Since its publication two years ago by a Dutch research team in the journal Science, the earlier finding had been used to encourage decision-makers to make "snap" decisions (for example, in the best-selling book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) or to leave complex choices to the powers of unconscious thought ("Sleep on it", Dijksterhuis et al., Science, 2006). But in the new study, to be published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, scientists ran four experiments in which participants were presented with complex decisions and asked to choose the best option immediately ("blink"), after a period of conscious deliberation ("think"), or after a period of distraction ("sleep on it"), which is claimed to encourage "unconscious thought processes". In all experiments, there was some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices and little evidence for superiority of choices made "unconsciously".
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POPSSCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.” “A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
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POPSThe 10 Most Puzzling Ancient Artifacts What are we to make of these finds? There are several possibilities: * Intelligent humans date back much, much further than we realize. * Other intelligent beings and civilizations existed on earth far beyond our recorded history. * Our dating methods are completely inaccurate, and that stone, coal and fossils form much more rapidly than we now estimate. In any case, these examples - and there are many more - should prompt any curious and open-minded scientist to reexamine and rethink the true history of life on earth.
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