Many low intensity gamma radiation beams converge on a single point in three dimensional space to ablate brain tissue, meanwhile a protective helmet affixed to the skull prevents midsurgical jitters.

Goodbye Cancer, Hello Science.

[Radiosurgery, background music]

Metafilter has a post listing ¡the best! essays from the past year as chosen by The Browser. There are a wide variety of subjects covered, and the latter website will hopefully prove to be a new, interesting one to follow.

Oh there was another Metafilter post a while back about short science fiction stories.

We think and organize our complex thoughts using models that manifest as analogies and metaphors. Of course we do this because we cannot perceive all the raw data of a system at once, nor is it even available– never mind that the validity, form, and existence of “raw data” is unknown. We must create abstractions to think and to communicate. The language we speak is a somewhat fundamental example of this. These ideas on their own are cool, but not actionable. The application comes from using this knowledge to influence how people think.

Oh right, the journal article.

[via reddit]

I was originally planning to have a separate blog addressing this question as I took the course, but the answer doesn’t warrant that much writing.

The reason organic chemistry is so infamous is because it requires a lot of upfront learning of its basic language before you can begin to do anything useful. That, and the professors are typically knowingly awful.

My recommendation is to find a good textbook and do practice problems until you are comfortable with what is going on. A general hint: follow the electrons!

Full article link here– I recommend reading the Science link below, first. I don’t understand the finer details of the experiment, but exciting are the questions of memory formation and how that information is stored. Also, maybe the idea of teleportation can be realized by approaching it as more illusory than real.

Although not new news, the idea of various hard coded oscillators in the brain that govern and synchronize different processes is cool and I can’t help but make comparisons to computers and the weird relationship that life has with time.

[via Science]