The interesting story of Mars

I found a nice narrated documentary clip about Mars that is quite interesting: it tries to prove that Mars was much like our Earth in the past, until a major catastrophe, at least.

47 Extraordinary Psychological Facts about humans

#1 — You Have “Inattention Blindness”

Firstly, check the video below:

This is an example of what is called “inattention blindness” or “change blindness”. The idea is that people often miss large changes in their visual field. This has been shown in many experiments.

So what does this mean if you are designing a website or something on a computer screen? It means that you can’t assume that just because something is on the screen means that people see it. This is especially true when you refresh a screen and make one change on it. People may not realize they are even looking at a different screen. Remember, just because something happens in the visual field doesn’t mean that people are consciously aware of it.

#4 — You Imagine Objects From Above and Tilted (The “Canonical Perspective”)

Why you should believe the research in this blog post even though it’s from 1981— Whenever I talk about “old” research some people start right away to dismiss it. It’s easy to think that research done in the 1990s or 1980s, or heavens! the 1970s! couldn’t hold any interest for us now. I heartily disagree. If the research is sound and it’s about people, then the chances are high that it still has relevance. Certainly if you are talking about research from the 1980s showing that it is hard to read text on a computer screen, then more recent data is important –  the quality of computer monitors has changed so dramatically from the 1980s till now (believe me on this one, as I was around to see the screens of the 1980s. I am aware that many of you reading this blog have only seen a screen from the 80s in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, or maybe you saw it in an old black and white movie (joke), or, as my daughter likes to say to me, “that must have been when you were younger and the dinosaurs roamed).Have an Open Mind— So the purpose of the above long preamble to ask you to have an open mind about the following research that was done and written up in a book from 1981.Draw a Coffee Cup — If you ask someone to draw a picture of a coffee cup, chances are they will draw something that looks like this:

Everyone Drew A Similar Picture — In fact, a researcher named Palmer went all around the world and asked people to draw a coffee cup and the pictures above were what people drew. Notice the perspective of the cups. A few of them are “straight on”, but most are drawn from a perspective as if you are slightly above the cup looking down, and offset a little to the right or left. This has been dubbed the “canonical perspective”.

Why Not This? — No one he studied drew this:

which is what you would see if you were looking at a coffee cup from way above and looking down. Of course not, you say, but…. why not? And if you are going to say that the first perspective is the one that we actually see most of the time, when we look at a coffee cup… that it is the angle we are used to seeing the cup on our kitchen tables, I will tell you that this research has been done on many objects. For example, people were shown pictures of horses from various angles and perspectives and they most quickly recognized it as a horse when it was from this same canonical perspective. Yet I am fairly sure that most of us have not looked at horses from above most of the time. And the research was done with people recognizing a very small dog or cat. The canonical perspective still won out, even though when we see cats or very small dogs we are mainly looking at them from high above, not just slightly above. In fact the research shows that when we imagine an object we imagine it from this canonical perspective.

So, Why Care? — It seems to be a universal trait that we think about, remember, imagine and recognize objects from this canonical perspective. Why care? Well, if you want to use icons at your web site or in your web or software application that people will recognize, then you might want to use this perspective. This is probably not so critical if you are using a well known logo, for example, the logo for itunes or Firefox, but becomes important if the icon is not as familiar, such as recognizing below that one of the logos is of a truck, or a photo printer.

Read More at BusinessInsider.com

Originally published at WhatMakesThemClick.net.

12 predictions for 2020

Not all of them seem to be realistic, but visit this page on popsci.com and you’ll found out.

Laser+Syringe=> Microscope

Well this is quite impressive: using just a laser and a drop of water you can project the microscopic world on a wall. That’s right, you can see bacteria and other small creatures moving through the water molecules.

Computational Knowledge

Wolfram Alpha

It’s fun to use StumbleUpon. A lot of times I find interesting sites not from the actually stumble, but within the pages that I find.

For example, I stumbled across this site with math comics(Spiked math) and I found it to be interesting(I’m not a math geek, I suck at maths but meh… some of those comics are funny ^^). While browsing the site I found this comic. Pretty funny, and I just wondered what “Wolfram Alpha” is. It turns out that to be curious is good sometimes, because I just found the coolest thing ever!

At first I was literally shocked to discover that a thing like this actually exists. I immediately thought about the internet already becoming self-aware, until I came to understand the limits of this computational engine.

Do you know http://www.cleverbot.com/ ? Wolfram Alpha is something like that, but much more sophisticated. Unlike cleverbot, it doesn’t focus on natural language communication(although it understands some of it: I tried asking its age and it responded(notice the engine interpretation though and the way it responds)). From what I understand until now, it focuses on the ‘knowledge’ part.

It’s basically an interactive ‘Wikipedia’ that also knows to do math and other calculations.

And it’s really fun! A really cool tool to discover more about the world faster, and heh… it’s also a good help for homeworks . Also, it’s TOTALLY FREE!

Because it doesn’t understand natural language pretty well(yet), there’s a page that helps you know how to ask questions for maximum efficiency. It’s a page full of examples from different topics.

Wolfram Alpha

Solar System discovered 127 light-years away

Well, I suppose it wasn’t suddenly discovered. There was some work for about 6 years studying the star HD10180 using a planet-finding instrument called “the HARPS spectrograph”, attached to ESO’s 3.6 metre (11.8ft) telescope at La Silla, Chile.

Scientists say it has about 7 planets, which makes this solar system hold the record on the number of planets so far.

Astronomers spotted the planets using spectroscopic analysis and the “wobble method,” where they look at slight wobbles in a star. These wobbles are caused by the gravitational forces from planets rotating the star, and researchers can extrapolate probable size and mass of the planets

Sadly, from what scientists have calculated, there are no planets that could sustain life or be hospitable enough for colonization, which makes this solar system improbable to colonize.

For further informations, watch this video :

Iphone Nose

-*sniff*, what’s that smell?

- Oh, wait, I’ll ask my phone!

NASA Develops IPhone Tricorder

A researcher at the NASA Ames Center has developed a proof of concept device which can convert an iPhone into a chemical sensor capable of detecting ammonia, chlorine gas, and methane. The chem sniffing device is a small silicon chip (no bigger than a stamp) that plugs into the phone. Upon detection, the chip uses the phone to alert others. It was developed as part of Homeland Security’s Cell-All program. The US hopes that one day a small, inexpensive, and portable chip such as this one could be used to turn thousands (or millions) of mobile phones into a means of quickly detecting hazardous chemicals in public environments. That detection could save lives and help direct first response units. Of course, for the nerds out there the device’s true importance is easy to see: it’s the next step to developing a tricorder from Star Trek.

Currently, the device is only able to detect a limited range of gases using a 64 nanosensor array (16 on each side of the chip). The range of gases it can identify will likely expand and be refined as nanosensors are developed for new substances. A small “sampling jet” collects air from the environment and directs it onto the array. The multiple channel silicon chip also knows how to use the mobile phone to connect, via WiFi or Telecomm, to other phones or a central hub to alert them in case of detection. That’s a nifty piece of engineering, and something we didn’t really see in Star Trek. The connectivity of detection devices is going to affect the way we use chem sniffers long before they become as complex as tricorders.

The chip once miniaturized and adapted could be fit to work in a wide range of mobile devices besides the iPhone. While the current device fits outside the iPhone housing, future devices could be included within the phone itself, using the sampling jet to gather outside air. Imagine having such a chip in every phone. Your mobile could warn you if it detected one of the bad gases in your area. In fact, if everyone had such a chip in their phone, any chemical dangers in the country could be identified almost instantaneously.

Which is the point of the $3 million Cell-All program: crowd-sourced detection. Crowd-sourcing, the distribution of a task among a large group of people, is a concept most often associated with civil disobedience, elaborate pranks, or community service. Yet as Wikipedia has demonstrated, there is great power to be had even in the unprofessional work of millions.

In the wake of the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Japanese rail system, officials were criticized for the long delays it took to identify the chemical used. Homeland Security hopes that the Cell-All program will eventually be able to provide an early detection system that could help undermine such an attack in the US. While it’s unlikely that we’ll see an ammonia, methane, or chlorine gas attack, the chem sniffer may one day be able to detect the more likely offenders (sarin, anthrax, etc).

Info from Singularity Hub

Scientists solutions to global warming

After I’ve talked about it, and show some ways of participating at the reduction of it, it’s now time to show you some crazy ideas about saving the earth from different scientists.

Mirrors in space

Scientists have recently come up with a very crazy idea: shooting mirrors into space. But that is a big thing to do, and you don’t need to be a scientist to work out the approximate numbers: trillions of mirrors would be needed. The trillions of mirrors would have to be fired one million miles above the earth using a huge cannon with a barrel of 0.6 miles across. It would stop the global warming process for centuries: enough time for humanity to evolve to the space-era. The production of these mirrors would amount to 20 million tons of material used.

The price of this is also enourmous: $350 trillion. Although impractical and possibly never going to be approved(well, probably in the next centuries or so ), it shows how much creativity scientists have to serious problems.

Iron in the Sea

As I already discussed in a previous article about the phytoplankton, another solution to get

more green blooms is dumping dissolved iron into the sea because it works as a fertilizer. The problem with this is that the possible side-effects are unpredictable and could be dangerous to the environment.

But it’s a much more practical and economical way to deal with the warming of the atmosphere.

Spraying water into the sky

Earth has it’s natural ways of reflecting the solar light and we can help it do better.Clouds, because they’re white, reflect a lot of solar heat. After all, isn’t cooler outside in cloudy days?

They hope they can achieve this by spraying a lot of sea water into the sky with the help of about 1500 boats that will spray 50 cubic meters of water per second.

Doing nothing crazy

A lot of scientists will surely disagree with the above methods. They look impractical, exceed the limitations of humanity and are rather dangerous.

We can do a little analogy here with the Occam’s razor(it’s a “law” that states  that the simplest theory is usually the correct one). In our case, I consider the most natural, cost-effective and practical ways of combating global warming the most possible and effective ones.

There are quite a lot of them if we think. You just have to search google for “green guides” and this sort of stuff. Scientists help us here too by researching hydrogen powered vehicles. We can make ourselves less dependent on fossil fuels by actually using the energy from the sun directly.

That’s right! Using fossil fuels is just using the sun’s energy indirectly. Think about it! Fossil fuels were formed in millions of years by dead plants and animals. Were did they come from? Well, plants took the energy directly from the sun, herbivores ate those plants, and carnivores ate herbivores… it’s a chain that is directly related to the energy from the sun. If you meditate a little about this subject imagine yourself observing the humanity from the skies you’ll come to the conclusion that what we do is just plain ridiculous.

Solar panels can generate both electricity and heat from the sun. Of course, in sunny days, but they are still effective combined with other green means of producing energy.

Wind turbines aren’t new to the scene. They’ve been used for centuries as flour mills. Now they are used to produce electricity there were the winds allow this. But you know, hehe, winds exist because of the temperature differences. And who does that? The sun….

Hydroelectric dams use falling water to produce massive amounts of electricity. They’re actually used at a very big scale being so efficient. So where’s the water coming from? You’ve learned about the water cycle in the nature at school. What is the motor that keeps this cycle running? You know, when water evaporates.. Aha ! The sun…

You should also know that in the 3rd world, poor people who live in hotter places use the energy from the sun to cook! For details about this, search for SOLAR COOKER on google. It’s very easy to build one yourself.

In conclusion to all this global warming story, what I have to say is that we need to be responsible. Earth was designed with a nature that intelligently controls the climate and keeps things running smoothly. We, people, just came in with our heavy industries and began disturbing the equilibrium.

We have to learn to have a natural lifestyle, to integrate ourselves into the nature, to be a part of it. That way, problems will stop and life here on Earth will make everyone smile.