Author: Brent Lambert

After seeing “The Social Network” last week I soon started hearing complaints about the film’s misogynistic portrayal of women.  The Playlist just posted this story on Aaron Sorkin’s defense of the female characters in his script: Following the release of “The Social Network,” a minor controversy has been brewing about the depiction of women in the film, with commentators at the likes of The Daily Beast, Salon and Jezebel all taking the film to task for its portrayal of womanhood. While writer Aaron Sorkin has had plenty of defenders (Alison Willmore at IFC wrote a particularly strong response), the “West…

New research coming out of the Institute For Cognitive Neuroscience in London is demonstrating “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, a technique that uses magnetic coils to affect one’s brain, and then to control the body. One of his research assistants, Christina Fuentes, is holding a loop-shaped paddle next to his head, moving it fractionally. “If we get it right, it might cause something.” She presses a switch, and the coil activates with a click. Prof Haggard’s hand twitches. “It’s not me doing that,” he assures me, “it’s her.” I watch as Christina controls Prof Haggard’s fingers like a marionette. The mechanical nature…

Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania is now home to North America’s largest green wall installation.  This past weekend the Garden’s new East Conservatory Plaza opened to the public, and revealed a long, curved facade of ferns and bountiful light from above.  The wall was designed by GSky to be fully automated and require low maintenance. The majority of the 47,000 plants are ferns which are planted in a non-soil growth medium.  Remote operated drip line irrigation and an array of sensors maintain the plants to help ensure quality control and longevity.  The wall essentially acts like a lung for the complex. …

Scientists have identified the part of the brain that appears to control introspection – the ability to think about what you are thinking.  The discovery could lead to an understanding of one of the key ingredients of human consciousness and could help to treat certain brain injuries where people lose their ability to reflect upon their own thoughts and actions.  Researchers found that people who were more introspective tended to have larger volumes of nerve tissue in an area of the prefrontal cortex, directly behind the eyes. “We found a correlation between introspective ability and the structure of a small…

I went to my family’s this weekend for Thanksgiving, and on my last day I was at my sister’s near Renfrew, Ontario.  They have a beautiful home on the Madawaska River, but right beside them is her husband’s grandfather’s estate.  He has since passed away and the entire estate is sitting there empty: empty barn, empty Victorian stone house (at least 130-years-old), and hundreds of acres of land nestled along the river.  I always love taking a walk through the property whenever I go for a visit.  It’s one of the most beautiful and peaceful places on earth.

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a…

PSFK has a great story on Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University Of Catalonia, whose latest project allows listeners to peek in on the sounds coming from ten hydrophones placed in specific underwater locations around Europe and Canada: The network’s primary aim is to record and archive long-term subsea noise so that researchers can study the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins. …An algorithm developed by André’s laboratory filters the different frequencies in the signal to identify specific sounds, including the songs of 26 species of whales and dolphins, and noise from human activities such as…