Scientific Minds Want To Know

Scientific Minds Want To Know

The ability to delay gratification allows humans to accomplish such goals as saving for retirement, going to the gym regularly and choosing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In a paper published March 28 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, a team of researchers for the first time causally shows that this ability is rooted in a part of the frontal lobe of the brain: the prefrontal cortex.

New Paper Pinpoints a Seat of Self-Control in the Brain

Pictish art may have actually been written language

 

How do you tell the difference between art and written language?

Oh, yeah. It's math.

[Rob Lee] and colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings, found on the few hundred known Pictish Stones. The researchers used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.
The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.

Shannon entropy is a measure of the amount of information that we get from knowing one English letter. It's kind of the Entropy of Wheel of Fortune—how many guesses does it take to figure out all the letters of a sentence using only the information provided by the letters previously guessed. Besides identifying ancient scripts, it makes for a fun, time-wasting applet game.

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From Treehuger:

photo: Martin Male via flickr.

A couple days ago we learned that, at least for now, it doesn't appear that the Gulf Stream is slowing down because of our changing climate. But now, new research has discovered more about how 13,000 years ago a mega-flood of fresh water poured into the Atlantic and trigged the millennia-long mini ice age known as the Younger Dryas.

Article continues: Route of 13,000 Year Old Mini Ice Age Inducing Mega-Flood Determined