The reasons we do and believe things are not the reasons most people would proffer.

For example, you will often see Jews attempt to argue that kashrut (kosher, in Yiddish) dietary rules make sense in arid environments where trichinosis was rife[1], and so on, but what is the reason why you can’t mix fabrics, or get tattoos? The reason appears to be that these marked the Jews out from their competing cultures. An approach taken by recent Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) scholars adopts the “costly signalling hypothesis” formulated in evolutionary biology by Amotz Zahavi and applies it to the cultural evolution of these kinds of displays.

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Why do believers believe THOSE silly things?
If, as I argued in the last post, believers believe silly things in order to make the community cohere in the face of competing loyalties of the wider community, why is it that they believe the thi…

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"Bokeh Magic" Photo: http://bit.ly/1cVlPsm by Corrie White

“Bokeh Magic” Photo: http://bit.ly/1cVlPsm by Corrie White

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I'm always a little suspicious of fMRI-based studies, but…

We tend to be creatures of habit. In fact, the human brain has a learning system that is devoted to guiding us through routine, or habitual, behaviors. At the same time, the brain has a separate goal-directed system for the actions we undertake only after careful consideration of the consequences. We switch between the two systems as needed. But how does the brain know which system to give control to at any given moment? Enter The Arbitrator.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have, for the first time, pinpointed areas of the brain—the inferior lateral prefrontal cortex and frontopolar cortex—that seem to serve as this “arbitrator” between the two decision-making systems, weighing the reliability of the predictions each makes and then allocating control accordingly. 

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Pinpointing the Brain’s Arbitrator
Caltech researchers ID a brain mechanism that weighs decisions We tend to be creatures of habit. In fact, the human brain has a learning system that is devoted to guiding us through routine, or habitual, behaviors.

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This type of research is the type that will take us from prostheses being only for amputees to being for everyone.

But recently, an amputee who allowed European researchers to plug electrodes into a bundle of his wrist nerves was able to control the strength of a prosthetic hand's grip and to distinguish the shapes and stiffness of three kinds of objects.

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Amputee Successfully Feels Prosthetic Grip Strength Via Arm Electrodes – IEEE Spectrum
Microelectrodes attached to nerves in amputated arm renew wearer's sense of touch

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_To get a sense of the conceptual mystery we face here, imagine you have three friends, John, Mary and Jo, who absolutely never talk to each other or interact in any other way. If any one of them is in town, there’s a one-in-four chance that this person will bring you flowers on any given day. (They’re generous and affectionate friends. They’re also entirely random and spontaneous – nothing about the particular choice of day affects the chance they might bring you flowers.) But if
John and Mary are both in town, you know there’s no chance you’ll get any flowers that day – even though they never interact, so neither of them should have any idea whether the other one is around. And if Mary and Jo are both in town, you’ll certainly get exactly one bunch of flowers – again, even though Mary and Jo never interact either, and you’d have thought that if they’re acting independently, your chance of getting any flowers is a bit less than a half, while once in a while you should get two bunches._

If you think this doesn’t make any sense, that there has to be something missing from this flower delivery fable, well, that’s how many thoughtful physicists feel about quantum theory and our understanding of nature. Pretty precisely analogous things happen in quantum experiments.

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Our quantum reality problem – Adrian Kent – Aeon
When the deepest theory we have seems to undermine science itself, some kind of collapse looks inevitable

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This doesn't actually surprise me, and causes me to fear about our ability to safely navigate future technologies that, used incorrectly, could pose an existential threat.

Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.

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The Truths Behind ‘Dr. Strangelove’
The Soviets did have a doomsday machine, and a rogue American officer could have launched a nuclear attack.

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MXE is part of a cultural shift that started a generation ago, but has taken on a new edge in the last few years. In 2008, the first in a wave of new, legal, synthetic drugs emerged into the mainstream. They had little to no history of human use. Instead, they were concocted in labs by tweaking a few atoms here and there—creating novel, and therefore legal, substances. Sold mainly online, these designer drugs cover every category of intoxication imaginable, and their effects resemble the full range of banned drugs, from the mellowness of marijuana to the extremes of cocaine and LSD. They are known as “legal highs,” and they have exploded in popularity: the 2012 Global Drugs Survey found that one in twelve people it surveyed worldwide takes them.

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The drug revolution that no one can stop
Designing your own narcotics online isn’t just easy—it can be legal too. How do we know? We did it.

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Phillip Plait writes in Slate about the current state of our search for Earth-ish planets in other solar systems. 

We haven’t found a precise twin of Earth yet, but we’ve come mighty close. In fact, it’s likely that there are millions, perhaps billions, of planets like ours in the Milky Way alone. But right now, at this moment, we only know of one for sure: ours.

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We May Have Already Found Another Earth
One of the biggest questions in astronomical research right now is quite simple to ask but extremely difficult to answer: In the depths of space, is there an Earth-like planet somewhere orbiting a Sun-like star? The answer is rather surprising: almost certainly yes. We haven’t found a precise twin of…

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