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POPSMost spectacular view in the Solar System Few sights in the solar system are more strikingly beautiful than softly hued Saturn embraced by the shadows of its stately rings. The Cassini Orbiter on its mission in deep space caught this rare occasion of Saturn eclipsing the Sun.
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POPSMobile phone tracker site! Track your gfriend/bfriend I used this to track my girlfriends number, gives accurate readings to the meter, well worth a try, i could'nt believe it! Did'nt think it was possible. I put my own number in and it found me on a map within seconds. Fast free and very interesting! Works worldwide http://www.planetcreation.co.uk/sat-gps
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POPSCould Jupiter wreck the solar system?
"So what's the likelihood Mercury could crash into the Earth? If it did, the asteroid that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs will seem like a drop in the ocean compared with a planet 4880 km in diameter slamming into us. There will be very little left after this wrecking ball impact. But here's the kicker: There is only a 1% chance that these gravitational instabilities of the inner Solar System are likely to cause any kind of chaos before the Sun turns into a Red Giant and swallows Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in 7 billion years time. So, no need to look out for death-wish Mercury quite yet… there's a very low chance that any of this will happen. But some good news for Mars; the researchers have also found that if the chaos does ensue, the Red Planet may be flung out of the Solar System, possibly escaping our expanding Sun. So, let's get those Mars colonies started! Well, within the next few billions of years anyhow…" Good stuff for the next science-fiction movie :-)
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POPSMirror-touch people who feel a touch on their own body when seeing another person being touched
Because of the study's small size -- the researchers tested just ten synesthetes, though in a sense the number is incredible, as only one such case was previously documented -- the findings are primarily important in terms of physiology. Mirror system activity was observed in the lone earlier synesthete, and the current findings back up the association between the feelings and the system: if the same system was responsible for the sensation, it would ostensibly be difficult to distinguish between real and mirror touches. The researchers also noted that mirror synesthetes had higher levels of empathy than a control group in the study, though connecting such findings to a general empathic mechanism requires, at this stage in the research, a leap of faith. But it's probably not too soon to say, as one of the study's authors did, that "This may be an exaggeration of a brain mechanism that we all possess to some degree."
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POPSNo Country for Sick Men Declaration of Independence says we all have "inalienable rights," including a right to life, and you can't have life without medical care to keep you alive. --- In the other advanced democracies, though, there's no debate. All of them recognize a right to "health care for all" as a moral obligation. --- In the other developed democracies, there's a basic floor of coverage that everybody is entitled to; that's why nobody dies in those nations for lack of care. In the U.S., in contrast, some people have access to just about everything doctors and hospitals can provide. But others can't even get in the door (until they are sick enough to need emergency care). That amounts to rationing care by wealth. This seems natural to Americans; to the rest of the developed world, it looks immoral. The question facing Americans this fall is: what should be the ethical basis of America's health-care system?
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POPSi-Aroma The company has already launched a scent-producing store signage system, piloted a mobile fragrance communication system and premiered smell-enhanced movies in Japanese theaters. With the i-Aroma, a more personal olfactory experience is on the way for volunteers lucky enough to be involved in the trial
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POPSThe Unappreciated, Holding Our Lives in Balance "Despite its humble reputation, the vestibular system has lately won fans among neuroscientists, who marvel at its sophistication and sensitivity, and how it tells us where we are and what we’re doing and why we should never again embarrass ourselves by going roller skating. They praise the machine-tool precision of its parts, the way the vestibular system discovered the laws of Newtonian mechanics some 400 million years before Newton and then put those principles to use to provision the head with little organic gyroscopes and linear accelerometers"
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POPSBlurring the Boundary Between Perception and Memory
Memory itself is not like a video-recording, with a moment-by-moment sensory image. In fact, it’s more like a puzzle: we piece together our memories, based on both what we actually remember and what seems most likely given our knowledge of the world. Just as we make educated guesses in perception, our minds’ best educated guesses help “fill in the gaps” of memory, reconstructing the most plausible picture of what happened in our past. The most striking demonstration of the minds’ guessing game occurs when we find ways to fool the system into guessing wrong. When we trick the visual system, we see a “visual illusion”—a static image might appear as if it’s moving, or a concave surface will look convex. When we fool the memory system, we form a false memory—a phenomenon made famous by researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who showed that it is relatively easy to make people remember events that never occurred. As long as the falsely remembered event could plausibly have occurred, all it takes
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