Here’s a fun TED Talk on happiness and how we can better achieve at as individuals and as a society.
Mind Space
Function Better in Your Old Age by Playing Music
Admit it: you’ve always wanted to play guitar, or perhaps, you’ve been meaning to pick it up again. Either way, you should!
New research has found that people with musical training on any instrument were able to certain task better in their old age when compared to non-musicians. So pick up your neglected jaw harp and get going on bringing those tunes in your head to life!
“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,†said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.â€
Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing†published online in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging.â€
“These are very interesting and important findings,†said Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. “They support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.â€
Female Politicians Inspire Young Women
A new study from MIT has concluded that female politicians boosts aspirations, educational achievement of young women. There have been a few international initiatives that look to improve the world by empowering women and now we know that getting more women into politics actually does make the world better!
Based on a survey of roughly 8,000 Indian adolescents and parents, the research paper, appearing this week in Science, notes that having women serve as the leader, or pradhan, of a village council erases the prevailing “gender gap†that tends to work in favor of young men, provided that female politicians remain visible in local government for an extended period of time.
“We think this is due to a role-model effect: Seeing women in charge persuaded parents and teens that women can run things, and increased their ambitions,†says Duflo, who is a co-founder of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She adds: “Changing perceptions and giving hope can have an impact on reality.â€
Why We Went Down Yesterday
Yesterday you probably noticed that most of your favourite websites were down yesterday or had a notice up warning you about two bills in front of the American government. Those bills are SOPA and PIPA and essentially if these bills pass the internet would be all but dead to American citizens and beyond!
Here’s a video by the Kahn Academy explaining the bills:
So why is this on a website dedicated to good news? Here’s why:
- Yesterdays coordinated action shows that disparate companies can join together to oppose harmful legislation.
- Thanks to Google 4.5 million people signed a petition against SOPA/PIPA
- Two million more people signed petitions at Avaaz.org and at Fight for the Future
- The protest worked and got legislators to end their support for SOPA/PIPA
Never forget that when people work together stupid policies and backwards thinking from old corporate powers (who are being replace by new and better technical solutions) can be stopped! Just look at how people also stopped the Keystone XL pipeline!
How do We Define Life?
Most of the news that gets covered here is related to new discoveries and good events happening around the world, but sometimes we need to take a step back from those discoveries and think deeper about what it all means. Recently NASA launched its most ambitious mission to Mars and they hope to find evidence of life.
But what is life?
Philosophers for hundreds of years have tried to answer this question and depending on who you ask we are closer or no closer than we were when humanity first asked such a question. Some people rely on old writings or established mythos for defining life, but those generally don’t old up when looking for something truly alien to us. Which leads us to something relatively new to the world of science and that is figuring out a sound and comprehensive definition for life for the purposes of scientific research.
Defining life poses a challenge that’s downright philosophical. There’s no ambiguity in looking for water, because we have a clear definition of it. That definition is the same whether you’re on Earth, on Mars, or in intergalactic space. It is the same whether you’re dealing with water as ice, liquid, or vapor. But there is no definition of life that’s universally agreed upon. When Portland State University biologist Radu Popa was working on a book about defining life, he decided to count up all the definitions that scientists have published in books and scientific journals. Some scientists define life as something capable of metabolism. Others make the capacity to evolve the key distinction. Popa gave up counting after about 300 definitions.
Things haven’t gotten much better in the years since Popa published Between Necessity and Probability: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life in 2004. Scientists have unveiled even more definitions, yet none of them have been widely embraced. But now Edward Trifonov, a biologist at the University of Haifa in Israel, has come forward with a new attempt at defining life, based on a new strategy. Rather than add on yet another definition to the pile, he’s investigating the language that previous scientists have used when they talk about life.
Edward Trifonov: Life is self-reproduction with variations.
Trifonov acknowledges that each definition of life is different, but there’s an underlying similarity to all of them. “Common sense suggests that, probably, one could arrive to a consensus, if only the authors, some two centuries apart from one another, could be brought together,†he writes in a recent issue of the Journal of Biomolecular Structures and Dynamics (article PDF).
