their research arose one of the most influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, a nurturing “mother” of life. But is it correct? New scientific findings suggest that the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia. If we were to choose a mythical mother figure to characterise the biosphere, it would more accurately be Medea, the murderous wife of Jason of the Argonauts. She was a sorceress, a princess - and a killer of her own children.

<img src=”http://content6.clipmarks.com/clog_clip_cache/amplify.com/263C950A-EE6B-46B8-B368-BFA2D5AC9DF4/63CAE951-11F9-488B-AD5D-D01F85F3D27B” alt=”Toxic gases and mass extinctions mean Earth isn’t always life friendly (Image: Sarah Howell)” width=”300″ height=”225″/>

“The Gaia theory says that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota.”

A number of recent discoveries have cast serious doubt on the Gaia hypotheses.

Both overturn key Gaian predictions and suggest that life on Earth has repeatedly endured “Medean” eventsRead more at www.newscientist.com

Somewhere between the harshness of reality and the fantasy of virtual reality lies the domain of Augmented Reality (AR).

The French company Total Immersion’s AR technology uses camera capture and 3D imaging techniques to blend surrounding and simulated environments in real-time.

ou’ve probably seen the videos floating around You Tube — people hold simple pieces of paper up to their web cameras and suddenly cool cars or a baseball player appear on the screen, seemingly right on top of the paper. The mash of real and virtual gives the illusion that both are occurring in the same space.Read more at singularityhub.com

See more at www.youtube.com

AR videos have been making the rounds on the Internet recently in part due to their nearly seamless blending of the captured and constructed images.

In the short term, AR will primarily be seen in two venues: interactive marketing and extended-content media.

See more at singularityhub.com

The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:

A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects–sofas, watches, etc.–subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red, and that we’re more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue.

High-ceilinged rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly, she reported, and low-ceilinged rooms leads to more attention to detail.

clutter increases the “memorability” of a room and establishes a reassuring sense of place.

See more at www.fastcompany.com

When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.

Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn’t due to these signals.

The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex.

Dualist philosophers like Descartes believed that the mind and consciousness exist outside the physical world, producing our actions by interacting with the physical meat of our brains. The idea has become commonplace, but it’s challenged by neuroscientific studies like this one, which show that the conscious intention to move emerges from electrical activity in neurons, tangible objects that are all too real.

See more at scienceblogs.com

(CBS)  Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.

“We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man,” researcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

McKubre is an electro-chemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery.

The same would go for cars. “The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you’d take it in for service every four years and they’d give you a new power supply,” McKubre told Pelley. Read more at www.cbsnews.com

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern.

Called the Georgia Guidestones, the monument is a mystery—nobody knows exactly who commissioned it or why.

the “guides” themselves, directives carved into the rocks. These instructions appear in eight languages ranging from English to Swahili and reflect a peculiar New Age ideology.Read more at www.wired.com

See more at www.wired.com

many who read what was written on the stones were unsettled.

Guide number one was, of course, the real stopper: maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity.

rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason

No humans were sacrificed on the altar of the stones, but there are rumors that several chickens were beheaded.

See more at www.wired.com

Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing have applied modular neural networks to model cognitive functions associated with awareness and time-delay neural networks to temporally model self-awareness.

This research represents a dual advance in the modelling of awareness-associated cognitive functions. On the theoretical side, it applies the theory of informons and holons to awareness structures. An informon is an information entity. It can take the form of data, news or knowledge. The term holon refers to autonomous entities that act both as a part and as a whole.

In the case of human beings, self-awareness does not imply just an abstract image of what one is, but also an image of one’s trajectory throughout time.

The proposed models and their neural network implementations have basically two possible fields of application.

these models could, from a practical viewpoint, also be applicable in the field of artificial intelligence.Read more at www.sciencedaily.com

Imagine that you could rewind the clock 20 years. It’s 1989. Madonna is topping the pop charts, and TV sets are tuned to “Cheers” and “Murphy Brown.” Widespread Internet use is just a pipe dream, and Sugar Ray Leonard and Joe Montana are on recent covers of Sports Illustrated.

But most important, you’re 20 years younger. How do you feel? Well, if you’re at all like the subjects in a provocative experiment by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, you actually feel as if your body clock has been turned back two decades. Langer did a study like this with a group of elderly men some years ago, retrofitting an isolated old New England hotel so that every visible sign said it was 20 years earlier. The men—in their late 70s and early 80s—were told not to reminisce about the past, but to actually act as if they had traveled back in time. The idea was to see if changing the men’s mindset about their own age might lead to actual changes in health and fitness. Read more at www.newsweek.com

Antidepressants have been heralded as miracle drugs that have changed the lives of millions of people. Depression, we are told, is an illness – a disease of the brain that can be cured by medication. But what exactly is the evidence for this? Could it be that we’ve been misled?

According to drug companies, more than 80% of depressed patients can be treated successfully. Claims like this have made antidepressants such as Prozac among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, with sales that top US$12 billion a year in the United States alone.

The companies claim that the effectiveness of antidepressants has been proven in published clinical trials showing that the drugs are significantly better than placebos.

But a closer look at the data tells a different story. Many depressed patients improve when given medication, but so do many given a placebo. The difference between the drug response and the placebo response is not all that great. Read more at www.cosmosmagazine.com

Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions.

As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply “wishful thinking.”

This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade.

scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making

While in the classical model an individual is committed to exactly one preference at any given time, in the quantum model an individual experiences a superposition of these preferences

While classical probability theory is too restrictive to fully describe human decision-making, this study shows that quantum theory provides a promising framework for modeling human cognition.Read more at www.physorg.com