Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates.

The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our perception of time shifts constantly, depending on the activities we’re engaged in, our age, and even how much rest we get. An upcoming paper in the journal European Review by Duke University mechanical engineering professor Adrian Bejan, explains the physics behind changing senses of time and reveals why the years seem to fly by the older we get. (The paper, sent to Quartz by its author, has been peer-reviewed, edited, and has been approved for publication but a date has not yet been set.)

Bejan is obsessed with flow and, basically, believes physics principles can explain everything. He has written extensively about how the principles of flow in physics dictate and explain the movement of abstract concepts, like economics. Last year, he won the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for “his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions…and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems.” [ read more ]

Much to the chagrin of summer party planners, weather is a notoriously chaotic system. Small changes in precipitation, temperature, humidity, wind speed or direction, etc. can balloon into an entirely new set of conditions within a few days. That’s why weather forecasts become unreliable more than about seven days into the future — and why picnics need backup plans.

But what if we could understand a chaotic system well enough to predict how it would behave far into the future?

In January this year, scientists did just that. They used machine learning to accurately predict the outcome of a chaotic system over a much longer duration than had been thought possible. And the machine did that just by observing the system’s dynamics, without any knowledge of the underlying equations... [ read more ]

Gray, blue, big, bigger: baleen whales put the mega in “megafauna.” In a new study published on April 4 in the journal Science Advances, researchers discuss the whole-genome sequencing of several of these mammoth species, including the blue whale—the largest animal alive. They found that these marine mammals are related in surprising ways, which could suggest that the most traditional view of evolution isn’t quite right.

Six of the species the researchers studied, including the humpback, fin, sei, minke and blue whale, are part of a family known as rorquals—they’re the baleen whales that have pleated throats, allowing them to gulp huge mouthfuls of seawater that they strain for food using baleen plates. Another baleen whale species, the gray whale, is currently separated into its own taxonomic family. But by sequencing the genomes of these species and applying a new form of scrutiny known as evolutionary network analysis, the researchers were able to demonstrate that the gray whale is also a rorqual, and that it’s closely related to fin and humpback whales: more closely, in fact, than those whales are to other rorquals... [read more]

Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media.

Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination [...Read more]

There were fireworks the night the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would not grant the easement allowing the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline—low, bright explosions lighting up the makeshift civilization on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. And then the protesters got back to work.

The Army Corps’ unexpected announcement on Dec. 4 has largely been hailed as a victory for the people who’ve spent months trying to block final construction of the pipeline. But at the camp, where members of more than 700 tribes have gathered with the Standing Rock Sioux—and have stayed, despite frigid temperatures—the news was received a bit more cautiously. Even when David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, told protesters it was time to go home and be with their families for the winter, many were reluctant. They know this decision is not conclusive—it’s more of a punt so the Army Corps can “explore alternate routes” and consider an Environmental Impact Statement “with full public input and analysis.” And the whole thing could be reversed by President-elect Donald Trump once he takes office... [read more]

You may think of ants as picnic pilferers. After all, who hasn't had to ward off ants stealing crumbs from picnic tables or hoarding tiny pieces of food from kitchens? But a new study shows that they're in fact hard working farmers. Or at least one species of ants is. It lives in Fiji and has been farming plants for some 3 million years.

The ant in question is Philidris nagasau, an ordinary looking, small, black ant. It lives in and eats Squamellaria, a plant that grows in the cracks and elbows of different kinds of trees. The Squamellaria plant, which looks more like a fungus, forms lumpy, brown, bulbous protrusions from the branches of the trees it lives on.

A 'field' of Squamellaria plants in a Macaranga tree farmed by a colony of Philidris nagasau ants. The tree overlooks the Fijian archipelago at sunset on Taveuni island.
Nature

The new study, published in Nature Plants, shows that these ants not only live inside these hollow plants, they also farm them.

"I first noticed the relationship when I saw dozens of these ant-filled plants clustered in the same trees," says Guillaume Chomicki, a botanist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the lead author on the study. He saw ants from a single colony moving back and forth between the plants they lived in. [...Read More]

Want to be smarter? More focused? Free of memory problems as you age?

If so, don't count on brain games to help you.

That's the conclusion of an exhaustive evaluation of the scientific literature on brain training games and programs. It was published Monday in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

"It's disappointing that the evidence isn't stronger," says Daniel Simons, an author of the article and a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"It would be really nice if you could play some games and have it radically change your cognitive abilities," Simons says. "But the studies don't show that on objectively measured real-world outcomes."  ...Read More »

One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.

The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up... [ read more ]