The Big Think

Curiosity is one of those personality traits that gets short scientific shrift. It strikes me as a really important mental habit – how many successful people are utterly incurious? – but it’s also extremely imprecise. What does it mean to be interested in seemingly irrelevant ideas? And how can we measure that interest? While we’ve analyzed raw intelligence to death – scientists are even beginning to unravel the anatomy of IQ – our curiosity about the world remains mostly a mystery. (According to one review of the literature, the amount of research on curiosity peaked in the late 1940s.) Einstein would not be pleased: “I have no special talents,” he once declared. “I am only passionately curious.”….

…curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped curve, so that we’re most curious when we know a little about a subject (our curiosity has been piqued) but not too much (we’re still uncertain about the answer). This supports the information gap theory of curiosity, which was first developed by George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon in the early 90s. According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because we that’s how we scratch the itch.

The Itch of Curiosity.

Maybe ET’s Calling, But We Have the Wrong Phone: “”

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Cecil Adams, answering the important questions.

What is the memory capacity of the human brain?: “

Anti-Cancer Agent Stops Metastasis In Its Tracks: “”

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Fractal Garden

A Primer on the Large Hadron Collider. What it is and how it works. You know, for all the theorists out there who don’t get engineering.

Specially constructed molecules could potentially block the expression of genes critical to the reproduction of viruses and the spread of cancer. But until now, doctors had been unable to direct those molecules to the right cellular nuclei. Scientists from the California Institute of Technology solved this problem by placing the RNA molecules in a specialized polymer robot with a chemical sensor. When the environment of a cancerous cell triggered the chemical sensor, the robot releases the RNA.

The trial involved three people with melanomas who received the RNA-load nanoparticles intravenously four times, for 30 minutes, over three weeks. At the end of that time, samples taken from the melanomas showed both the presence of the RNA, and a reduction in tumor gene expression.

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How to turn a sphere inside-out – Absurd Intellectual: “”

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122 degrees F. and 100% humidity make special suits and breathing gear mandatory, but these crystal structure would make it worth it. Beautiful!

Scientists decode the entire genetic code of skin cancer and lung cancer. Although this is just a first step in curing these (and other) cancer’s, it’s a huge first step. Equivalent to unearthing the Rosetta Stone in the detangling of Heiroglyphs.

Popular science on how old is dirt.