The Scientific Method @madscienceisradscience-blog - Tumblr Blog

The hipster astrophysicist (and alive) Scrödinger’s cat is absolutely right, the main sequence is not what it was, Horizontal branch is hottest!

Personal note: The designer of this blog (and drawings) has studied in the same university as me. What a small world!

To the tune of "SHOTS" by LMFAO

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neurosciencestuff

Neuroscientists disprove idea about brain-eye coordination

By predicting our eye movements, our brain creates a stable world for us. Researchers used to think that those predictions had so much influence that they could cause us to make errors in estimating the position of objects. Neuroscientists at Radboud University have shown this to be incorrect. The Journal of Neuroscience published their findings – which challenge fundamental knowledge regarding coordination between brain and eyes – on 15 April.

You continually move your eyes all day long, yet your perception of the world remains stable. That is because the brain processes predictions about your eye movements while you look around. Without these predictions, the image would shoot back and forth constantly.

Errors of estimation People sometimes make mistakes in estimating the positions of objects – missing the ball completely during a game of tennis, for example. Predictions on eye movements were long held responsible for such localization errors: if the prediction does not correspond to the eventual eye movement, a mismatch between what you expect to see and what you actually see could be the result. Jeroen Atsma, a PhD candidate at the Donders Institute of Radboud University, wanted to know how that worked. ‘If localization errors really are caused by predictions, you would also expect those errors to occur if an eye movement, which has already been predicted in your brain, fails to take place at the very last moment.’ Atsma investigated this by means of an ingenious experiment.

Localizing flashes of light Atsma asked test subjects to look at a computer screen where a single small ball appeared at various positions at random. The subjects followed the balls with their eyes while an eye-tracker registered their eye movements. The experiment ended with one last ball on the screen, followed by a short flash of light near that ball. The person had to look at the last, stationary ball while using the computer mouse to indicate the position of the flash of light. However, in some cases, a signal was sent around the time the last ball appeared, indicating that the subject was NOT allowed to look at the ball. In other words, the eye movement was cancelled at the last moment. The person being tested still had to indicate where the flash was visible.

Remarkable findings Even when test subjects heard at very short notice that they should not look at the ball – in other words when the brain had already predicted the eye movement – they did not make any mistakes in localizing the flash of light. ‘That demonstrates you don’t make localization errors solely on the basis of predictions’, Atsma explained. ‘So far, literature has pretty much suggested the exact opposite. That is why we repeated the experiment several times to be sure.’

The findings of the neuroscientists in Nijmegen are remarkable because they challenge much of the existing knowledge about eye-brain coordination. Atsma: ‘This has been an issue ever since we started studying how the eyes function. For the first time ever our experiment offered the opportunity to research brain predictions when the actual eye movement is aborted. Therefore I expect our publication to lead to some lively discussions among fellow researchers.’

(Image credit)

I'm still alive! The scarce presence as of late is a consequence of finals week, but I shall be back soon!

#finals #engineering #engineering lyfe #science #math #college #university

asapscience

Number 83 on the periodic table, fresh Bismuth looks silver, but takes on a rainbow of colours after oxidization. Science is beautiful!

infinityfield

androgynouskelly

What are the ingredients of an “all natural” banana?

Thanks to I F-ing Hate Pseudoscience

plymoth-offical-deactivated2014

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skunkbear

This is Skunk Bear’s 100th post! It’s only right that we celebrate with a GIF that combines Charles Darwin and an internet meme.

Thanks for following, liking and reblogging! If you’re a new follower, here’s what we’re all about.

itsokaytobesmart

I got to thinking about the weight of rain, and I realized I had no idea how much rain really weighed, so I looked it up, and made a thing. 113.3 tons, fallin’ on your head.

Want to see where I got my numbers? Click here.

4gifs

coolsciencegifs

Refraction Contraption

No, you aren’t going crazy and you haven’t found yourself with Alice in Wonderland staring at arrows pointing in opposite directions. In fact, you have just demonstrated a physics concept called refraction, the bending of light.

When the arrow is moved to a particular distance behind the glass, it looks like it reversed itself. When light passes from one material to another, it can bend or refract. In the experiment that you just completed, light traveled from the air, through the glass, through the water, through the back of the glass, and then back through the air, before hitting the arrow. Anytime that light passes from one medium, or material, into another, it refracts.

Just because light bends when it travels through different materials, doesn’t explain why the arrow reverses itself. To explain this, you must think about the glass of water as if it is a magnifying glass. When light goes through a magnifying glass the light bends toward the center. Where the light all comes together is called the focal point, but beyond the focal point the image appears to reverse because the light rays that were bent pass each other and the light that was on the right side is now on the left and the left on the right, which makes the arrow appear to be reversed. The diagram explains this better.

source

awkwardsituationist

daniel stoupin, a doctoral candidate in marine biology at the university of queensland, has photographed a variety of coral species using full spectrum light to reveal fluorescent pigments that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. each piece (click pic for name) is from the great barrier reef. given the complexity of the techniques used, which involve time-lapse and stereoscopic and focus stacked photography, the images take up to ten hours to produce in the lab.

Working on a MATLAB program that randomly generates a shape with randomly generated dimensions and plots them on random places on a graph. I'm working a collision detection that will cause circles that "collide" or overlap to cancel on or the other out, depending on whichever one is bigger. Hopefully once I get the code down for circles I can move onto squares, triangles, and eventually, entire fractals. I'm hoping to use this program to gain a better understanding of fractal heterogeneity as well as increase my understanding of MATLAB programming.

#MATLAB #fractals #circles #bubble #bubbles #foam #random #programming #tui #gui #figure #mathematics #materials science engineering #research #fun

scienceisbeauty

An awesome project. You can perfectly spend the day (or the week) navigating through these sites.

The Human Connectome Project aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain.

More info:

The Human Connectome Project (consortia)

NIH Blueprint Human Connectome

Open Connectome Project

Developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP)

The Brain, in Exquisite Detail (NYT)

Wikipedia