The Bitcoin Paradox

A Blockchain Explainer
"It’s easy to become enchanted with the dizzying profits being made with BitCoin, and with the elegance of the mathematics beneath it. But it’s dangerous to forget that the point of these systems is to bring the political power of common knowledge into the Internet age, together with all of its potential for disruption and conflict"

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Via: Nautilus
h/t

What If Consciousness Doesn't Drive the Mind?

It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, Peter Halligan & David A Oakley argue that this is a mistake.

They suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur.

Put simply, we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.

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Via: Real Clear Science

The Serial-Killer Detector

"Thomas Hargrove is a homicide archivist. For the past seven years, he has been collecting municipal records of murders, and he now has the largest catalogue of killings in the country—751,785 murders carried out since 1976, which is roughly twenty-seven thousand more than appear in F.B.I. files. States are supposed to report murders to the Department of Justice, but some report inaccurately, or fail to report altogether, and Hargrove has sued some of these states to obtain their records. Using computer code he wrote, he searches his archive for statistical anomalies among the more ordinary murders resulting from lovers’ triangles, gang fights, robberies, or brawls. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these men and women have undoubtedly killed more than once. Hargrove intends to find them with his code, which he sometimes calls a serial-killer detector."

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Via: The New Yorker 

The Hidden Science and Tech of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium was a pragmatic and down-to-earth culture—it developed sophisticated systems for taxation, justice, administration, and military deployment—and it also exhibited prowess in science and technology. In his new book, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire, Anthony Kaldellis aims to capture this side of the Byzantines.

Byzantine military inventors perfected Greek Fire, a combustible liquid like napalm that could be hurled at enemy ships (or lobbed against land armies as hand grenades); a Byzantine philosopher made two synchronized clocks, placing one at the frontier and one in the capital, so that messages could be sent across Asia Minor via a network of fire signals, each message keyed to the time of day or night that it was sent; and Byzantine theologians included ancient Greek science within the basic curriculum of learning that aspiring religious thinkers had to master.

Follow the link to read about six notable successes (and failures) of Byzantine science and engineering.

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Via: Nautius

Fright Fest: The Science Behind Why We Love to Be Scared

Every week of the year, in rural Summertown, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, retired Navy man Russ McKamey terrorizes people. McKamey Manor is a haunted house, but it's nothing you'd send your kid to for Halloween. It's billed to interested parties as "live your own horror movie."

 Taking pleasure in fear is actually quite normal, it turns out. According to Kate Brownlowe, neuropsychiatrist and section chief of neurobehavioral health in the department of neurology and psychology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, being afraid is essential to human survival. "On an evolutionary basis, people who had a good fear response to things that were dangerous were far more likely to survive in the wild," she tells Mental Floss.

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Via: Mental Floss

The IQ test has a dark history

"Since its invention, the IQ test has generated strong arguments in support of and against its use. Both sides are focused on the communities that have been negatively impacted in the past by the use of intelligence tests for eugenic purposes.
The use of IQ tests in a range of settings, and the continued disagreement over their validity and even morality, highlights not only the immense value society places on intelligence — but also our desire to understand and measure it."

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Via: The Week

What Happened at Nikola Tesla's Secret Experimental Station?

Tesla claimed that he could transmit electric power abundantly and cheaply anywhere on the planet but there is little to no evidence that Tesla succeeded, not even in his own meticulous notes.

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Via: Real Clear Science

Scientists may have found the root cause of Dyslexia and a way to treat it

 

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the so-called learning disability may actually start in the eyes.

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Via: theguardian

Automakers Plan Electric Car Blitz as Tesla Burns Billions

Here are two facts that defy logic: By the end of the year, electric-car maker Tesla Inc. will have burned through more than $10 billion without ever having made 10 cents. Yet companies around the world are lining up to compete with it.
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Via:Bloomberg 

If the Universe Is Expanding, What Does It Expand Into?

The universe doesn't have to be expanding into anything in order to expand. I know that sounds ridiculous, so let me give you a different example that is easier to understand.

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Via: Quora

What Happens to a Donor’s DNA in a Blood Transfusion?

Reader Cathy wrote in wondering what becomes of a donor’s DNA once it gets inside another person during a blood transfusion.

Most of the time, the answer is nothing, because the donor’s DNA never makes the trip to a new home.

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Via: Mental Floss

When the Blind Can Suddenly See, Do They Know What They’re Looking At?

In a new study published online by Nature Neuroscience, patients who had been blind since birth underwent sight-restoring surgeries as children or adolescent. In the day or two following surgery, patients seemed unable to match what they felt with their hands with what they saw, the researchers found, but a week later, they could.

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Via: Discover Magazine

How Great Entrepreneurs Think

Think inside the (restless, curious, eager) minds of highly accomplished company builders.

Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, set out to determine how expert entrepreneurs think, with the goal of transferring that knowledge to aspiring founders.

Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals.

By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it.

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Via: INK.com

Tools Suggest Earlier Human Arrival in America

Clovis people weren't the first in America.

For many years, scientists have thought that the first Americans came here from Asia 13,000 years ago, during the last ice age, probably by way of the Bering Strait. They were known as the Clovis people, after the town in New Mexico where their finely wrought spear points were first discovered in 1929.

But in more recent years, archaeologists have found more and more traces of even earlier people with a less refined technology inhabiting North America and spreading as far south as Chile.

And now clinching evidence in the mystery of the early peopling of America — Clovis or pre-Clovis?

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Via: NY Times

Skull in Underwater Cave May Be Earliest Trace of First Americans

Explorers have discovered what might be the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas.

Alex Alvarez, Franco Attolini, and Alberto (Beto) Nava are members of PET (Projecto Espeleológico de Tulum), an organization that specializes in the exploration and survey of underwater caves on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

Alex, Franco and Beto have surveyed tens of thousands of feet of mazelike cave passages in the state of Quintana Roo. The team's relatively recent explorations of a large pit named Hoyo Negro (Black Hole, in Spanish), deep within a flooded cave, resulted in their breathtaking and once-in-a-lifetime discovery of the remains of an Ice Age mastodon and a human skull at the very bottom of the black abyss.

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Via: National Geographic

British cave yields ice-age skull cups

Ice age Britons drank from human skulls and may even have eaten flesh and bone marrow, but they were far from barbarians.

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Via: PhysOrg.com

Five Shocking Facts About What Drinking Does to Your Body

On one day liquor’s making you fat (so many calories!), the next it’s keeping you thin (drinkers eat less dessert!). It may be causing your depression or it could be your biggest stress buster. For the longest time conventional wisdom seemed to say that it all came back to moderation. But then this past August a new study blew the lid off of that theory too, concluding that even heavy drinkers outlive non-drinkers.

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Via: Good

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories

In case you haven’t noticed, this site is currently being bombarded by a certain strand of conspiracy theorist. I’m still not entirely sure what these people believe in, apart from being absolutely certain that the government is developing brain-eating vaccines, spiking the water with lithium and trying to subdue the population with “reactive” medicine. While it’s always sad to see so much angry ignorance on parade, it’s also a fascinating case study in cognitive dissonance.

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Via: Wired

Why Do We Love Our Dentists?

Dentistry is basically the unpleasant experience. They poke in your mouth. It’s uncomfortable. It’s painful. It’s unpleasant. You have to keep your mouth open. And I think all of this pain actually causes cognitive dissonance and cause higher loyalty to your dentist.

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Via: Wired

Tricks Our Minds Play On Us

Our brains are incredibly complex organs that allow us to comprehend both our surroundings and abstract concepts. Unfortunately, because our minds have to process so much information at once in order to help us understand things, they can also be easily tricked. Here are a number of ways your brain not be as reliable as you like to think.

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Via: Neatorama