Scientists have found that magnetic interference with the brain makes it impossible to lie, a discovery they say could be the most effective way to extract information from crime suspects unwilling to tell the truth. Estonian researchers found that stimulating part of the front brain with magnets alters the simplicity of lying. The team found that when magnets were applied to either the right or left side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, found directly behind the forehead, it makes a person lie or tell the truth, depending on which side was stimulated. However, magnetic interference directed at another part of the brain, the parietal lobe, was found to have no impact on the people’s decision-making, the researchers said. “Spontaneous choice to lie more or less can be influenced by brain stimulation,” study researchers Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann were quoted as saying by the Daily Mail. For their study, published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, the researchers recruited a small group of 16 volunteers who were given coloured disks. Then, half of them were given magnetic stimulation on the right side of their prefrontal cortex, half on the left. They then had two options: to lie about what colour their disks were, or tell the truth. Results showed that the volunteers who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, while the ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth. The experiment was repeated while a different brain region — the parietal lobe — was stimulated and it produced no effect, the researchers said.
A six tonne Nasa satellite is set to fall uncontrolled out of orbit, potentially raining debris over swathes of the planet including Britain, the US space agency has admitted.
Scientists in South Africa announced a hoard of fossil finds documenting a puzzling forerunner to modern mankind belonging to the prehuman species Australopithecus Sediba that lived nearly two million years ago. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz has details on Lunch Break.
Scientists in South Africa announced a hoard of fossil finds Thursday documenting a puzzling forerunner to modern mankind that lived nearly two million years ago, with human-like hands and ape-like feet.
Unearthed near Johannesburg, the extensive collection of fossils—including the most complete early specimen of a hand known—highlights a sparsely documented era of evolution when four or more ape-like hominid species roamed Africa, each one a natural experiment in anatomy and dawning intelligence. The new finds all belong to a prehuman species of that time calledAustralopithecus sediba, discovered in 2008.
From head to toe, the bones reveal an unexpected patchwork of primitive and advanced traits, the researchers reported in the journal Science. The tiny skulls, long arms and diminutive bodies were all chimp-like; yet the hands, ankles and pelvis were surprisingly modern.
A model of the creature's grapefruit-size brain, based on a three-dimensional X-ray scan of its fossilized cranium, hinted that its structure had been growing more advanced, heralding perhaps the first glimmer of sophisticated mental abilities.
"It's as if evolution is caught in one vital moment, a stop-action snapshot of evolution in action," said paleoanthropologist Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, who wasn't involved in the discoveries.
Based on its analysis, the international research team of 80 scientists and technicians, led by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said the species was the most probable ancestor of the family to which all modern humans belong, the genus Homo.
"They do represent a model that could lead to the genus Homo," Dr. Berger said.
Brett Eloff/Lee Berger and the University of Witwatersrand
Prof. Lee Berger with the Australopithecus sediba cranium.
Four independent experts in the field of human origins, however, strongly discounted that claim. The species, which stood about four feet tall, was more likely an evolutionary dead end, they said.
"Just because it shares a bit of anatomical morphology with Homo does not mean it is Homo or ancestral to Homo," said anthropologist Bernard Wood at George Washington University. "It looks increasingly that these bits of morphology are appearing more than once, independently, in the tree of life."
Even so, the bones are invaluable. "They're stunning," Dr. Wood acknowledged. The fossils challenge some assumptions about human origins and are certain to prompt years of scholarly debate. "This is an incredible trove for anything that early in time," said anthropologist Ian Tattersal, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.
So far, Dr. Berger and his colleagues have discovered 220 bones from skeletons of five individuals, including infant, juvenile and adult remains representing both sexes, in the Malapa Cave at the United Nations Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, about 28 miles from Johannesburg.
They dated the finds at 1.977 million years old, based on a laboratory estimate of the rate of decay of uranium traces in the cave sediments.
Brett Eloff/Lee Berger and the University of Witwatersrand
The cranium of the juvenile skeleton of Australopithecus sediba.
The creatures may have belonged to a family group that died by falling into the deep cave. Their remains came to light when erosion exposed the ancient sediments that had buried them. Some of the bones were found still connected to each other, as they would have been in life.
The creature's right hand featured a long thumb and short fingers able to grip tools, yet the curvature of the hand and the gangling arms appear more suitable for swinging on branches. There were no stone tools in evidence.
In the same way, the arch of its foot and its leg bones were well suited for human-like upright walking—with a slightly knock-kneed gait—while its heel and shin bone were more like those of a chimpanzee, better configured for climbing trees.
To the researchers' surprise, the primitive creature's pelvis was "the most human-like" ever discovered among a prehuman species, Dr. Berger said.
ESRF/Lee Berger and the University of Witwatersrand
Australopithecus sediba skull reconstruction.
source : Stv
Most scientists have longed believed that the pelvis evolved to accommodate the birth of big-brained infants. But this early species had very small brains, leaving researchers wondering whether the need to walk more efficiently, rather than the demands of childbirth, shaped the biomechanics of the pelvis and hip joints.
"This hand is wonderful. The foot is fine. And the pelvis is spectacular," said anthropologist Philip Rightmire at Harvard University's Peabody Museum. "Evolution is more convoluted than we thought."
Analysis of dolphin communication with Information Theory has shown it to be surprisingly intricate and possibly second only to human communication in terms of complexity on Earth. CREDIT: Wild Dolphin Project.
How do we define intelligence? SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, clearly equates intelligence with technology (or, more precisely, the building of radio or laser beacons). Some, such as the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, suggested that intelligence wasn't just the acquisition of technology, but the ability to develop and improve it, integrating it into our society.
By that definition, a dolphin, lacking limbs to create and manipulate complex tools, cannot possibly be described as intelligent. It's easy to see why such definitions prove popular; we are clearly the smartest creatures on the planet, and the only species with technology. It may be human hubris, or some kind of anthropocentric bias that we find difficult to escape from, but our adherence to this definition narrows the phase space in which we're willing to search for intelligent life.
Technology is certainly linked to intelligence – you need to be smart to build a computer or an aircraft or a radio telescope – but technology does not define intelligence. It is just a manifestation of it, perhaps one of many. [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
Astrobiologists see intelligence a little differently. The dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to learn, while others see it as the capacity to reason, to empathize, to solve problems and consider complex ideas, and to interact socially.
Intelligence in the universe
If we take these characteristics to be a broad working definition of intelligence, our view of intelligent life in the universe suddenly looks very different. No longer are we confined to considering only life that has technology.
To be fair to SETI, at this moment in time it cannot search for anything other than beacons – the vast distances across the cosmos coupled with our own baby steps into the Universe mean that we don't have the capability to search for any other form of intelligent life other than those that can deliberately signal their presence. However, what a wider definition of intelligence tells us is that we are not alone, not even on our own planet Earth.
Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford, was one of the first to put forward the theory that the evolution of intelligence is driven by social factors, allowing animals to survive, interact and prosper in large and complex social groupings. These include notions of reciprocal altruism (I scratch your back, you scratch mine), politics (forming sub-groups and coalitions within the larger group) and understanding the emotions of others (empathy, which in turn relies on theory of mind, the ability to be aware of one's self and others).
Looking at it that way, modern social networking on media such as Facebook may just be a symptom of what helped drive us to become intelligent in the first place, many tens of thousands of years ago.
Here's the trick – to be social, you must be communicative. Staying quiet is anti-social. Personal interactions require communication, of some form, and the more complex the interaction, the more complex the communication. So if intelligence and social behavior is linked – and many people agree that it is – then the best place to start looking for intelligence is in animals that like to chat with one another.
And that brings us to dolphins.
Ever since the 1960s, when John Lilly popularized the notion that dolphins may be cleverer than your average animal, dolphin intelligence has courted controversy, tempted us with tantalizing but thin evidence, and remained elusive. We know they are able to communicate by a variety of means, from whistles and barks to echo location, and researchers working with captive dolphins have discovered that they understand syntax, i.e.the difference between a statement and a question, or past and future tense.
As Carl Sagan once famously said, "It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to 50 words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."
"Carl Sagan was right!" said Lori Marino, a biopsychologist from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. "We still don't understand the natural language system of dolphins and whales. We know a little bit more now, and there have been investigators working on this for decades, but we haven't really cracked the code."
In that case, how can we be sure they even have a language? Justin Gregg, a researcher at the Dolphin Communication Project in Connecticut, is skeptical. "Most scientists, especially cognitive scientists, don't think that dolphins have what linguists would define as language," he said. "They have referential signaling, which a lot of animals do – squirrels and chickens can actually do that, and monkeys – and they have names for each other. But you can't then say they have a language because human words can do so much more."
How smart are dolphins?
Nevertheless, some scientists continue to fight in the dolphins' corner. Referential signaling involves tagging things with names, such as having a specific whistle to identify sharks, or fishing boats, or food. "That sounds like a good definition of language to me," said Laurance Doyle, a scientist at the SETI Institute in California. "Put it this way: the first premise that I think everyone agrees on is that all animals communicate, so once you buy that the next question is, how complex is each communication system?"
It is this question that has prompted Doyle to reappraise what we define as intelligent complex communication, and what types of signals we should be looking for with SETI. He applies a statistical analysis technique called information theory to languages in order to determine their complexity. It turns out that, according to information theory, dolphin communication is highly complex with many similarities with human languages, even if we don't understand the words they are saying to one another.
Information theory was developed in the 1940s by the mathematician and cryptologist Claude Shannon, mainly to be applied to the then-burgeoning technology of telecommunications. It operates on the knowledge that all information can be broken down into 'bits' of data that can be rearranged in myriad ways. George Zipf, a linguist at Harvard, realized that language is just the conveyance of information, and therefore could be broken down too.
Think of all the different sounds human beings make as they speak to each other, the different letters and pronunciations. Some, such as the letters 'e' and 't' or words such as 'and' or 'the' will occur far more frequently than 'q' or 'z' or longer words such as 'astrobiology'. Plot these on a graph, in order of the most frequently occurring letters or sounds, and the points form a slope with a –1 gradient.
A toddler learning to speak will have a steeper slope – as they experiment with words they use fewer sounds but say them more often. At the most extreme a baby's babble is completely random, and so any slope will be nearly level with all sounds occurring fairly evenly. It doesn't matter which human language is put through the information theory test – be it English, Russian, Arabic or Mandarin – the same result follows.
What is remarkable is that putting dolphin whistles through the information theory blender renders exactly the same result: a –1 slope, with a steeper slope for younger dolphins still being taught how to communicate by their mothers, and a horizontal slope for baby dolphins babbling. This tells us that dolphins have structure to how they communicate.
Meanwhile, another feature of information theory, called Shannon entropy, can tell us how complex that communication is.
Doyle makes the analogy to marching soldiers. Imagine one hundred soldiers on parade, walking in all different directions across a field. Then they are called to attention, and form ten neat rows of ten. Prior to the call to attention, when they are marching randomly, they have maximum entropy, maximum disorder, maximum complexity. Once they are lined up structure is imposed on them; their entropy decreases as does their complexity when coupled with a corresponding increase in structure.
Language is the same. Write down 100 words on one hundred pieces of paper and throw them into the air and they can be arranged in myriad ways. Impose rules on them, such as sentence structure, and your choices automatically narrow. It is a bit like playing hangman; you have a five-letter word where the first letter is 'q', so the rule structure of English necessitates that the second letter is 'u'. From thereon there is a limited number of letters that can follow 'qu' and so you may have 'que' or 'qui' or 'qua' and you can predict that the word is 'quest' or 'quick' or 'quack'. Shannon entropy is defined as this application of order over data and the resulting predictability of that order.
"It turns out that humans go up to about ninth order Shannon entropy," said Doyle. "What that means is, if you are missing more than nine words then there is no longer a conditional relationship between them – they become random and pretty much any word will do." In other words, there are conditional probabilities, imposed by the rule structures of human languages, up to nine words away.
Dolphin intelligence tests
Doyle has analyzed many forms of communication with information theory, from the chemical signals of plants to the rapid-fire radio transmissions of air traffic control. How do dolphins fare? "They have a conditional probability between signals that goes up to fourth order and probably higher, although we need more data," said Doyle.
The problem with studying dolphin communication is being able to study them for any great length of time out in the wild, which requires patience and money. This is where Denise Herzing comes in. She is based at the Wild Dolphin Project in Florida, and has spent much of her time working with the same pod of wild dolphins for the past 27 years, documenting the complexity of their communication, acoustic signals and behavior over that time period.
"We know them individually, we know their personalities, we know their communication signals and we already do things together that seem to be of interest [to them]," she says. "What we're now trying to do is develop an interface that takes advantage of those small windows where we have their attention and they want to interact with us."
This interface, developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence specialist Thad Starner at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and marine cognitive scientists Adam Pack of the University of Hawaii and Fabienne Delfour at the University of Paris, is known as CHAT, the Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry device. It's a smart phone-sized gizmo that can I.D a dolphin whistle in real time. It's worn around the neck of a diver and connected up to a pair of hydrophones and a one-handed keyboard called a 'twiddler'.
By agreeing with the dolphins on a common artificial language, neatly side-stepping the problem of translation, it is hoped that CHAT will enable humans and dolphins to talk in real time. For instance, dolphins will be able to request toys such as a ball or a hoop from humans, and vice versa. Although it won't be the most meaningful conversation in the world, it will be conversation and that in itself will be revolutionary.
Still at the prototype stage, Herzing sees CHAT as an extension of all the work done in communication studies with captive dolphins over the past few decades. "To have high-powered, real-time computer technology to help us recognize specific signals that the animals make could empower us to bridge that gap and allow humans into their acoustic world," she says. The plan is to test the device this year, before getting it out into the wild in 2012.
How complex dolphin communication really is remains to be seen. We must be careful not to anthropomorphize. We know their communication has nuances that are incredibly complex, but so do other species of animal, from bees to plants. Do dolphins have language with the scope and breadth to converse about anything like we can with human language, or is it more basic? Justin Gregg would argue the latter case.
"Essentially they do behave in complex and interesting ways, but there are no great mysteries in what they do that can only be answered with language," he says.
Herzing and Doyle are more optimistic. "Dolphins have exquisite sound and they have a lot of places they could potentially encode information – we just haven't looked adequately yet," says Herzing. She has worked with Lori Marino and the SETI Institute's Douglas Vakoch on how we can recognize intelligence other than human intelligence.
Meanwhile, Doyle has suggested that SETI should search for signals with information content that has a –1 slope. We may find that an alien signal displays complexity up to 10, 15, of 20th order Shannon entropy. What would such a language be like?
To explain, Doyle highlights the example of Koko, a captive gorilla that has learned sign language and can understand concepts like "tomorrow" or "yesterday". But combine time tenses, and Koko doesn't understand.
"If you say to her, 'by this time tomorrow I'll have finished eating', Koko doesn't understand the two time jumps, that at some point in the future there will be a point in the past," said Doyle. "Now imagine an alien comes with more complex abilities. They may say, 'I will have to be have been there'. Now there's nothing wrong with that per se, but humans can't handle three time jumps or more. An alien could just think in a more complex way." So instead of double entendres, they might have triple or quadruple entendres.
What all this tells us is that intelligence is manifest in communication just as much as it is in technology and, if intelligence is truly derived from social behavior, then it may be far more prevalent than technology. If intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, then intelligence brings with it culture, which means something that is learned. We see baby dolphins learning from their mothers so, in the crudest sense, we might say that dolphins have culture and intelligence.
By escaping the assumption that intelligence must equal technology, we see that there are many other intelligences on Earth – ask Lori Marino, and she'll tell you that even the simplest multi-cellular life could be considered intelligent to a degree, thanks to its nervous system.
But it also poses a problem for SETI – if the Universe is full of intelligent, social, communicative but non-technological dolphins and the like, then there will be no radio beacons to transmit signals. The Universe could be full of life, of intelligence, and we would never know it.
What will the future look like? Will people fly to work? Will one live a disease free life? Will one never age? Brilliant thinkers, cutting edge research, backyard inventors are on the way to breakthrough science that will change lives forever. Watch the future being invented on Innovation Nation every Thursday at 8:30 pm on Discovery Science.
Rahul Johri, senior vice president & general manager - South Asia, Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific, said, “Discovery Science will present inspiring real stories of innovation in a captivating new series Innovation Nation. Inventions, technologies, revolutions you could only imagine are made real in this series."Innovation Nation features budding inventors, innovators and designers who have been laboring away in sheds to dig out things that we would have only thought of. Travelling across the globe from cutting-edge research to ingenious inventors, it offers intimate access to the people who make high science a reality. Real world demonstrations, lab experiments, and in-depth interviews are complemented by stunning visuals, all of which bring the planet's bravest new ideas to life.
Innovation Nation travels the globe to find out if we can stop or reverse global warming? How close are we to making robots that can perceive and think like humans? Will wind or algae-based biomass one day provide all our energy needs?
Innovation nation:Episodic descriptions CO2Innovation Nation follows the work of a Nobel Prize winning scientist on the Canadian prairies, an innovator in New York who has designed a unique synthetic tree, and a mega-project in Europe where CO2, instead of being sent skyward, is stored far out of harm's way deep beneath the sea bed.Wind PowerAlong with cutting-edge wind farms and new turbine designs, Innovation Nation meets renegade inventor Doug Selsam as he builds the world's first flying turbine, a device that may just change our world.Bio fuelAlong with exploring bold new ways of harvesting energy from bio-mass, Innovation Nation uncovers an amazing bio-fuel jet truck, a record breaking flying machine, and a unique car made almost entirely of organic matter.CommunicationsAs we become digitally more connected, at ever increasing speeds, new technologies seek to transform the way we interact with one another and our environment. Innovation Nation looks at the brave new world of augmented reality, robotic tele-presence, and technologies that can only exist in a future filled with 4G ultra-broadband.Robots at workRevolutionary new machines are being designed and built for the workplace of tomorrow. Along with visiting robotic labs around the world, Innovation Nation explores robot-human psychology and tests out an exo-skeleton, a robot that you can strap on and wear.Artificial IntelligenceInnovation Nation explores the fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence, taking us into labs and workshops where innovators teach robots to perceive, think, and move just like human beings.
I am a creature of nature took birth on March,11,1993 at a small town of Jabalpur.Childhood & Primary was normal at Saraswati Shishu Mandir.One of my achivement And destiny of life is Navodaya. Navodaya ? , its Nothing But everything for me. Its a dream of Rajiv Gandhi and going realize.I don't know my ULTIMETE aim But I want to do everything that I can do In this short Lifespan.I haven't any specialty as usual people have.But than also I can sing,write,compose,imagine and can make lot of funny.arts. Learning is my passion.I don't think any work out of my coverage.My subjects at 12 were Biology + Computer Science.I am interested In INTERNET(Facebook-0.09%,Googlling->90%) ,Biology(Life science, paleontology,Obstetrics,Genetics,Brain Functionality) The best philosopher in my view was OSHO.He cleared my most of the confusions about the life,interesting thing is that I have never saw him in reality.In my view there is something invisible in this universe due to virtue of which everything is going right,that is the ultimate King.My parents gave me full in dependency to do everything I want,and Its important too for every teenager.The tough work for me is ,to explain the seven years of NAvodaya.
Scientists have found that magnetic interference with the brain makes it impossible to lie, a discovery they say could be the most effective way to extract information from crime suspects unwilling to tell the truth.
