The headline in the New York Post reads: 1 in 331 billion chance: Same New York lottery numbers drawn twice in one day. Sounds impressive – the problem is, it’s entirely wrong. What is true is that the same five numbers, 18, 21, 30, 35, and 36, were drawn in the New York Take Five lottery in both the midday and evening drawings for Thursday, October 27. The Post reports that "experts" (unnamed) told them the odds of this happening are 1 in 331 billion.
The Post called this a "lottery miracle" but in fact it is a classic example of what is called, with good reason, the "lottery fallacy".
A unique new material developed at University of Limerick in Ireland has shown significant promise in the treatment of spinal cord injury. The new hybrid biomaterials, in the form of nanoparticles and building on existing practice in the tissue engineering field, were successfully synthesized to promote repair and regeneration following spinal cord injury, according to the researchers.
What are the known factors that increase the risk of getting cancer? Most people know about smoking, but can probably only guess at other factors, and are likely to endorse things that do not contribute to cancer risk.
Researchers have developed a cheaper and more energy-efficient way to make hydrogen directly from seawater, in a critical step towards a truly viable green hydrogen industry. The new method splits the seawater directly into hydrogen and oxygen - skipping the need for desalination and its associated cost, energy consumption and carbon emissions.
One interesting perceptual bias is called serial dependence bias – what we see is influenced by what we recently saw (or heard). It’s as if one perception primes us and influences the next. It’s easy to see how this could be adaptive. If you see a wolf in the distance, your perception is now primed to see wolves. This bias may also benefit in pattern recognition, making patterns easier to detect. Of course, pattern recognition is one of the biggest perceptual biases in humans. Our brains are biased towards detecting potential patterns, way over calling possible patterns, and then filtering out the false positives at the back end. Perhaps serial perceptual bias is also part of this hyper-pattern recognition system.
Psychologists have an important question about serial dependence bias, however. Does this bias occur at the perceptual level (such as visual processing) or at a higher cognitive level?
A 'biocomputer' powered by human brain cells could be developed within our lifetime, according to researchers who expect such technology to exponentially expand the capabilities of modern computing and create novel fields of study.
I place the link here in this thread, because I think that this is already very scientific. One can look here times the evolution of the earth over the last 750 Mil years pictorially. Absolutely exciting and instructive.
Anxiety biomarkers: "researchers found molecular biomarkers that correlate with anxiety states, make sense from a basic science approach, were validated with a fresh cohort of subjects, and were found to have clinical utility in terms of predicting later risk of anxiety. Still – this is one study, and the whole approach of molecular psychiatry is very complex. Independent verification, and further exploration of clinical utility are warranted. But this is a solid step."
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