>>>The proud new owner is Jack Wang, chief executive of a Chinese company that intends to sell [walnut-sized, flying saucer-shaped] electromagnetic devices that it claims have medically regenerative powers."<<<<
None of the claims are proven yet of-course...
Yeah - the trick worked both ways>>
"on the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time."
"In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick, neuroscientists have found a way to predict whether convicted felons are likely to commit crimes again from looking at their brain scans. Convicts showing low activity in a brain region associated with decision-making and action are more likely to be arrested again, and sooner."
From the article -"The research world’s most famous human cell has had its genome decoded, and it’s a mess. German researchers this week report the genome sequence of the HeLa cell line, which originates from a deadly cervical tumour taken from a patient named Henrietta Lacks.
Established after Lacks died in 1951, HeLa cells were the first human cells to grow well in the laboratory. The cells have contributed to more than 60,000 research papers, the development of a polio vaccine in the 1950s and, most recently, an international effort to characterize the genome, known as ENCODE."
NASA's just confirmed this story on their twitter feed.
>>>@NASA #RussianMeteor is largest reported meteor since Tunguska event. Impact was at 3:20:26 UTC. Still being measured. More info to come.
Bit unfair. The article repeatedly says there are promising techniques for crowd-sourcing etc and that Google Flu Trends has been quite accurate in the past. Also says that a few methods have entered the mainstream. It's a rather good overview of the efforts for tracking flu IMHO.
To an extent, engineered bacteria do this already. Though E coli are quite tolerant, I've known instances when they reject foreign DNA that you're trying to get into them (eg to express a protein).
He doesn't say nothing was really proven - he just says that they didn't establish whether this dislike of dissonance was innate or not. That wasn't what the experiment was about. It was to find what caused the dislike - and they ruled out 'beating' and propose it's harmonicity.
It's also not beating per se which people find unpleasant but rapid beating -roughness. Does Gamelan try to produce 'roughness'-ie rapid beating - or just beating - which I could imagine would be quite cool.
Fair enough, and I shouldn't just knock it without even reading carefully. It's frustrating sometimes to see discussions like these that seem to completely ignore the very wide variety of sounds that people find pleasant. I've perhaps read too many claims that "music is a universal language" when it far from that.
You should search out some recordings; I played in a gamelan ensemble for a while and quite enjoyed it. The sound is cool, and the interlocking rhythms do neat things in your head. :)
The beats -- I'm not sure if they're rapid enough to qualify as "roughness" or not; I've never encountered that term before, but they're fairly rapid and give a shimmering effect.
