Just a short article on the coming shut down of the Tevatron Collider.
It has had a pretty storied and important 28 year history and I find it sad that the United States is letting another research facility fall to budget cuts.
This article was a very interesting one to me as it deals with recording from the brain. Neuroscientists at the University of California Berkeley were able to scan brain activity from subjects as they watched clips from Hollywood movie trailers. Using these functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans they were able to create an algorithm that would reconstruct the neural events captured in each scan. While the study provides a lot of exciting moves forward it is still limited by current imaging techniques as each patient had to be scanned 10 times while watching the video trailer over and over. Currently the process takes about two hours and only creates a blurry, ghostly video approximating what the subjects were watching.
Definitely an interesting study regardless of how the videos come out. To think that we’re working on technology that can start to scan and understand the brains complexities in neural activity is exciting.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/mind-reading-movie-clips-110922.html
This is an interesting blurb article about some findings out of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Apparently some of the measurements taken there show neutrinos moving 60 billionths of a second faster than the speed of light over a 730 km distance. While they are waiting for others to run tests to help confirm these results they have high confidence in what they are measuring. This prove interesting because if any particles are measured as moving faster than the speed of light part of Einstein’s theory of special relativity will be proven wrong.
My question is when can I expect my time traveling DeLorean from all of this?
I just thought this was a cool video and needed to be posted for others to see. Watch it in fullscreen and you feel like you’re in space.
Yet another cool usage for the ever versatile 3D printer. Paleoanthropologists in the Bronx are using a 3D printer to recreate fossilized monkey skulls as new plastic models that they can work on. Using the 3D printer they can modify the models in all dimensions to study how different these skulls were from modern ones.
I think it’d be pretty cool to get an MRI and print out a 3D model of my skull, but maybe that’s just me.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=three-3d-printing-how-does-a-printer-make-a-fossil
The Website of Ryan Pourcillie 
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