Everything you know is wrong: Oranges aren’t orange.

 

http://io9.com/everything-you-know-is-wrong-oranges-aren-t-orange-1097312640?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+io9%2Ffull+%28io9%29

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Many fruits are picked while they’re still a little green and left to ripen during transport, in the store, or just become hard little fruit-bombs in a bowl in peoples’ homes. Most green oranges, on the other hand, are perfectly ripe. By the time they turn orange they’re sliding downhill towards rot. The green skin of an orange isn’t indicating that not enough of its natural color is coming through. It’s just pumped full of chlorophyll. In warm, sunny countries, that chlorophyll stays in the fruit. It’s only when the fruit is exposed to cold that the chlorophyll dies off and the orange color shines through.

Since most people associate green fruit with unripe fruit, most green oranges in the United States and Europe have to be colored to be sellable. In some cases they are exposed to ethylene gas, which breaks down chlorophyll. Some are shocked with cold, or covered in wax. Some are scrubbed down with detergent and some are just dipped in dye. Anything for a sale.”

IBM Dreams Clone of Human Brain

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/ibm-modha-brain-language/?mbid=social10647814

“In the short term, Modha’s project won’t change anything. It’s more ambitious than that. After striving to clone the brain using everyday computer chips and good old fashioned C programming code, the team is now building a new type of chip — as well as a new programming language — that more closely resembles the brain. Or at least the brain as we know it. They’re breaking with 70 years of tradition to rethink the way we design computers.

Known as a “neurosynaptic core,” their new chip includes hardware that mimic neurons and synapses — the basic building blocks of our nervous system and the connections between them. And in recreating the basics of the brain, Modha says, the chip eschews traditional methods of computer design. “This tiny little neurosynaptic core really breaks from the von Newmann architecture,” Modha says. “It integrates processor and memory and communication.” The idea is that you could then piece multiple cores together — creating ever larger systems, spanning an ever larger number of fake neurons and synapses.”

Orgasm as pain killer

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/science-world-orgasm-ad_n_3733133.html?utm_hp_ref=science

“Beverly Whipple, co-author of The Science of Orgasm, told LifeScript that orgasms increase pain thresholds by more than 108 percent. In experiments on rats, orgasms produced a pain-killing effect equal to "10 milligrams of morphine per kilogram of body weight," she said.

The climax triggers a surge of the hormone called oxytocin, which acts as a positive neurotransmitter to the brain, Woman's Day reports. The pain-easing effect lasts for about 10 minutes.”

A new archaeological technique gives insight into the day before death

 

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/uosd-tdb080913.php

“The detailed insight into the life of the child did not come from analyses of the child's bones. Instead Kaare Lund Rasmussen and his colleagues have developed a method to extract information from the soil surrounding the body of the dead child in the cemetery in Ribe, Denmark.

"When the body decays in the grave a lot of compounds are released to the surrounding soil – by far most of them organic compounds. Also most of the inorganic elements are transformed to other compounds and later removed by the percolating groundwater throughout the centuries that follows. If we can localize an element in the soil in the immediate vicinity of the skeleton which is not normally found in the soil itself, we can assume that it came from the deceased and this can tell us something about how the person lived. We are not interested in death, but in the life before death", Kaare Lund Rasmussen explains.”

The Psychology of Distrusting G.M.O.s

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/the-psychology-of-distrusting-gmos.html

“the natural is what we find more familiar, while what we consider unnatural tends to be more novel—perceptually and experientially unfamiliar—and complex, meaning that more cognitive effort is required to understand it. The natural is seen as inherently positive; the unnatural is not. And anything that involves human manipulation is considered highly unnatural—like, say, G.M.O.s, even though genetically modified food already lines the shelves at grocery stores. As Michael Specter put it, “The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.”

They were, essentially, experiencing something known as the halo effect, a phenomenon whereby one positive attribute of a person or thing colors other, unrelated characteristics in a positive light.

G.M.O.s, in contrast, suffer from a reverse halo effect, whereby one negative-seeming attribute (unnaturalness, in this case) skews over-all perception.

What’s more, when we’re in a state of heightened emotion, we don’t weigh risks and benefits equally—risks take on an outsized impact and benefits begin to pale in comparison.

Once an initial opinion is formed, Slovic continues, it is very difficult to shift it with new evidence: the exact same piece of information—say, additional data on the effects of G.M.O.s on a natural ecosystem—can be interpreted in opposing ways, depending on your starting point.

Slovic argues that three things stand in the way of a logical, analytical risk assessment of new technologies: our level of dread, our degree of familiarity (or lack thereof), and the number of people we believe the technology will effect. G.M.O.s are at the extreme of that scale, high in dread and possible impact, while being low in familiarity:”