Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Do You Want to Live Forever?

This show is all about the radical ideas of a Cambridge biomedical gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey who believes that, within the next 20-30 years, we could extend life indefinitely by addressing seven major factors in the aging process. He describes his work as Strategies for Engineered Negligible...

March 29th, 2011 | Big Ideas | Read More

The neurons that shaped civilization

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

February 14th, 2011 | Science of the Mind | Read More

Deers of Perception

These reindeer have been fed a mushroom that makes their urine hallucinogenic. Or have they? Sam Williams visits Carsten Höller’s new ‘scientific experiment’ What could be more festive than spending a night locked in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic...

January 28th, 2011 | Health & Happiness | Read More

Time tangled up in Quantum…

Why is it that psychologists still abhor parapsychology with all this stuff going on in physics? Dr. David Luke x Physicists describe method to observe timelike entanglement January 24, 2011 by Lisa Zyga (PhysOrg.com) – < More information: S. Jay Olson and Timothy C. Ralph. “Extraction...

January 25th, 2011 | Extended Mind | Read More

Genetically-Engineered Aliens?

Mirror-Image Cells Could Transform Science — or Kill Us All Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture...

December 22nd, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

‘Tame’ bears guard Canadian marijuana farm

Police raiding a marijuana farm in western Canada were astonished to find black bears apparently guarding it. However initial alarm wore off when officers realised the 10 or so bears did not behave aggressively and were in fact docile and tame. Police believe dog food was used to attract the animals...

August 25th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More

An answer to the ‘Nature vs Nurture’ Debate?

Savage-Rumbaugh’s work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology — and how much by cultural exposure.

August 6th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

Monkey Economicus?

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in “monkeynomics” shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too. Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics —...

August 4th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Did the ingredients for Life come from Space?

Ice and organic chemicals found on an asteroid back the theory that asteroids provided the Earth with the bare necessities of life Astronomers have detected a coating of ice and organic chemicals on one of the largest asteroids in the solar system. From the Guardian The space rock, called 24 Themis,...

July 28th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

Genetically Modified Animals

UNLESS you live in Europe, your last meal probably contained genetically modified ingredients – 80 per cent of soya grown worldwide is now genetically engineered, for instance. Yet while modified plants are rapidly taking over the planet’s farms, the same cannot be said for GM animals. There’s...

July 28th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More