Scientists Discover a Way to Pull Their Heads Out Of Their Asses

A 2003 initiative to share data and findings among 100 Alzheimer research studies has lead to a new understanding of the devastating disease.

This unprecedented data sharing is the result of a large group of scientists dropping their egos and getting together to get shit done--a rare feat in academia.

I can only hope this is the first in a growing trend of scientists acting like adults and working towards a better understanding of everything.

I'm looking forward to the science wiki featuring all data and findings of all the scientists in the world. I can only imagine what would happen if all the best research minds in the world collaborated to create a repository of their collective knowledge.

To quote the Instapundit, "Faster please."

Regional Racism

Critics like to paint the South as a hotbed of ignorant racism, and film and TV does us no favors, creating racist charicatures that almost always hail from the South.

But I have suspected for some time now that the seat of American racism lies not in the South, where we have had to deal with the issue of race in our daily lives for hundreds of years, but rather that the most racist region lies to our North, specifically in the American Northeast.

My suspicions have been scientifically confirmed by some kindly Stanford economists, who's experimental paradigm consisted of an iPod for sale in a Craigslist ad.

Over the course of a year, they placed hundreds of ads in local online markets, randomly altering whether the hand holding an iPod for sale was black, white, or white with a big tattoo. Here is what they found:

Black sellers do worse than white sellers on a variety of market outcome measures: they receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers. These effects are strongest in the Northeast, and are similar in magnitude to those associated with the display of a wrist tattoo.

Interesting that the Northeast, the supposed bastion of liberal tolerance, is also where black people face the most racism.

The research delves deeper into the data, finding even more measures on which blacks are at a disadvantage, but I felt this particular geographic detail to be the most interesting.

[via those awesome guys at Freakonomics]

How your Brain Perceives Time

The passage of time is anything but settled science. Einstein said time was relative, depending on how fast you were traveling. New science suggests that our perception of time is also relative, depending on how fast your brain is working.

Scientists Perfect Thought-to-Speech Algorithm

Scientists implanted electrodes inside the speech motor cortex of a paralyzed 26 year old's brain, allowing him to speak via electronic assistance.

Previous direct brain communication technology has focused on typing individual letters. The new technique translates the sounds of speech directly, allowing patients to merely think of saying the word and the computer translating it with a latency of 50ms, a speed on par with a healthy human being.

Signals collected from an electrode in the speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The Neuralynx System amplifies, converts, and sorts the signals. The neural decoder then translates the signals into speech commands for the speech synthesizer. Credit: Guenther, et al.

This technology is being developed by Frank Guenther of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems and the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Boston University, as well as many more academics and firms

[PhysOrg via Gizmodo]