If You Want To Study Better And Learn Faster Or Even Teach, Using The Feynman Technique Is Good Starting

Imagine an enormous, lush rainforest teeming with life…in the Arctic. Well there was a time – and not too long ago – when the world warmed more than any human has ever seen. (So far)

watercolour botany

BOMBTURBATION

Yes, it’s your new word for the day and a real phenomenon studied by today’s geoscientists – bombturbation.

Essentially, it reflects the change in a geomorphologic surface due to bombing. Whether by cannon balls or A-bombs, whenever the surface of the Earth is blown up, there is a tendency to create craters. Bombturbation was initially applied to the disturbance of soil due to warfare (Hupy and others 2006): a bomb or some sort of artillery explosion excavates a crater, ejecting soils out into a surrounding rim of mixed material. Bombing can have the effect of creating entirely new geomorphological environments as seen in photos of Omaha Beach (#37 at http://tinyurl.com/nyhdu8), US Civil War Battlefields (http://tinyurl.com/kamaebd), or as in the present photo, the Nevada nuclear test site.

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AI-controlled brain implants for mood disorders tested in people 

Brain implants that deliver electrical pulses tuned to a person’s feelings and behaviour are being tested in people for the first time. Two teams funded by the US military’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of ‘closed-loop’ brain implants that use algorithms to detect patterns associated with mood disorders. These devices can shock the brain back to a healthy state without input from a physician.

The work, presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Washington DC, could eventually provide a way to treat severe mental illnesses that resist current therapies. It also raises thorny ethical concerns, not least because the technique could give researchers a degree of access to a person’s inner feelings in real time.

The general approach — using a brain implant to deliver electric pulses that alter neural activity — is known as deep-brain stimulation. It is used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, but has been less successful when tested against mood disorders. Early evidence suggested that constant stimulation of certain brain regions could ease chronic depression, but a major study involving 90 people with depression found no improvement after a year of treatment.1

The scientists behind the DARPA-funded projects say that their work might succeed where earlier attempts failed, because they have designed their brain implants specifically to treat mental illness — and to switch on only when needed. “We’ve learned a lot about the limitations of our current technology,” says Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who is leading one of the projects.

Holtzheimer, P.E., et al. Lancet Psychiatry. 4(11):839–849. (2017)