"Your brain is not a video camera," writes Vice, in an article that describes something seemingly impossible: Music affecting how our brains perceive the world. This is not about a perspective or point-of-view--it's about how music can actually create a motion aftereffect in our perception. What we see is fundamentally different from reality.

Motion aftereffects are common without a musical element. Stare at this animated waterfall, for example, and when the image shifts, your brain will still see motion when it isn't there. But the idea of music affecting our perception is far more interesting, because it shows how tangled our sensory processes are.

Photo credit: Flickr user Maxime Gendre via Creative Commons.

"[Pascal] Wallisch and colleagues are the first to report a disruption in people’s judgment of visual motion from listening to music," writes Vice. "The experiment was simple. Participants listened through headphones to ascending and descending piano scales for sixty seconds. Then they had to judge the direction of moving dots on a computer screen. The authors found that subjects who listened to scales that moved “up” the piano perceived the dots to move down. Those who listened to scales that moved “down” perceived the dots to move up."

Wallisch furthers his statement, that the world we perceive is hardly concrete reality, by pointing out that the retina is a 2D surface, and our 3D perception is actually created by how the brain infers information. "Put differently," writes Vice, "not only is the brain not a video camera, the audio feed is not even independent of the visual feed. It is inherently tangled up. Already on the frontend. In most cases, this is beneficial to disambiguate the world. We are simply taking advantage of this in this experiment.”

Listening to jazz, which is structurally complicated, may do more to affect your cognition than pop music.

The article digs beyond how music affects perception into how music actually affects the way we think. Listening to one type of music or another isn't going to completely define your personality, but listening to jazz, which is structurally complicated, may do more to affect your cognition than pop music.

When you think about our cultural understanding of music and how deeply it's integrated with our visual processing, the motion aftereffect makes sense. Vice writes that it's"elicited by confusion between your brain’s audio and visual feeds" and how we perceive musical scales. We associate "up" with ascending scales and "down" with descending scales (even though those keys are actually arranged from left to right on a keyboard).

Wallisch speculates that tribes who haven't been exposed to this musical form won't experience the same aftereffect. Sounds like the basis for an even more interesting experiment.

Here's a little behind-the-scenes detail for you. For this week's videos with Chris Hadfield (you've seen them by now, right?), Chris actually played cameraman himself for all the footage shot on the ISS. This was likely the case for his now-famous Space Oddity music video, which makes the feat that much more impressive. The video clips the Canadian Space Agency relayed to us were 720p video shot from on a Nikon DSLR, and while we were reviewing the footage, we noticed speckles of static white pixels throughout the video. It looked like dead pixels on our monitors, but they were actually damaged pixels on the ISS cameras!

The prosumer-grade cameras used on the International Space Station aren't heavily modified for use in space (they are certified through a rigorous testing process), so they actually aren't shielded from the cosmic radiation that exists both outside and inside the station. So when video is being recorded and the DSLR's mirror is flipped up, high-energy particles slam into the digital sensor and damage it permanently. According to astronaut Rex Walheim of STS-135, cameras that are taken on space walks may suffer severe radiation damage on sensor pixels. NASA evaluates the damage and decides whether or not to retire that camera for use.

Cosmic radiation (primarily gamma rays) are a well-known phenomenon for NASA and its astronauts. Some astronauts, including Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, have even reported seeing streaks of light that were determined to be cosmic rays zipping past their eyes. The most prolific astronaut photographer, Don Pettit, described the rays' effects on ISS equipment on his blog:

"Free from the protection offered by the atmosphere, cosmic rays bombard us within Space Station, penetrating the hull almost as if it was not there. They zap everything inside, causing such mischief as locking up our laptop computers and knocking pixels out of whack in our cameras. The computers recover with a reboot; the cameras suffer permanent damage. After about a year, the images they produce look like they are covered with electronic snow. Cosmic rays contribute most of the radiation dose received by Space Station crews. We have defined lifetime limits, after which you fly a desk for the rest of your career. No one has reached that dose level yet."

So rewatch our videos with Chris Hadfield and see if you can catch those speckles of damaged pixels--it's just another consideration that astronauts have to be mindful about when living on orbit!

Watching certain episodes of the the original Star Trek, it's hard not to laugh at the show's 1960s-era technology transplanted into the future. But one of the series' most famous pieces of technology, the science tricorder, is still ahead of its time--it may be bulky, but it's still able to identify any known life form in a way modern scientists dream of. More than forty years later, we're still jealous of the tricorder, but scientists have actually figured out how to replicate its technology using a process called DNA barcoding. It's almost as good as Spock's magic box.

In "The technologhy that links taxonomy and Star Trek," BoingBoing describes the advances biologists have made in being able to identify different animal species. Ironically, the computational power needed for DNA barcoding fills a lab, much like the gigantic computers that existed when Star Trek was on the air in the 1960s. Spock's tricorder still has an advantage when it comes to portability, but as BoingBoing writes, we really can identify most organisms on the world with DNA barcoding.

Photo credit: Flickr user hartsell via Creative Commons.

"Canadian biologist Paul Hebert...thought there might be an easy way to quickly identify species using short DNA sequences that are unique to one species or another. If you had a database of these sequences, then all you'd have to do would be to match a sample to a sequence and you'd know what species you were looking at. It's similar to the way we store fingerprints, and then use those to match prints from a crime scene with an individual person."

Sounds easy! But it's not, of course. Here's the problem: DNA barcoding animals commonly relies on a gene called COI, which is a piece of mtDNA found within a cell's mitochondria. This DNA is passed down from generation to generation in the egg cells of organisms, picking up errors and changes in the sequence from one mother to another. Those changes in the sequence are what make DNA barcoding work, but they're also what make it tough.

Science is constantly discovering new things about the human brain. Just last week we wrote about how the brain can track a 100 mile-per-hour fastball thanks to the visual cortex. Part of the cortex is actually predicting where a fast-moving object is going to be--a 100 mile-per-hour fastball moves 12.5 feet in the amount of time it takes a signal to travel from our eyes to our brain. It's the kind of small discovery that neuroscientist Henry Markram may completely overshadow in the next decade as he attempts to do something unprecedented: model and simulate the entirety of the human brain on a supercomputer.

In January, the European Commission awarded Markram $1.3 billion in funding to pursue his ambitious goal. Back in 2009, he gave a TED talk about simulating the human brain and set out to accomplish that goal within a decade. Now he's got the kind of funding most scientists can't even dream of and the ambition to match. As neuroscientists are still making small discoveries about how the brain operates, would it be possible for Markram to chart every synapse within the next decade?

Photo credit: Sophie Moet.

Wired's great profile of Markram can't answer that question, but it does detail the challenges and promise of his research, the controversy, and Markram's grand goal of uniting the world's neuroscientists under his program. Jonathon Keats writes:

The Ultimate Burger, declares Modernist Cuisine, is no simple creation. It requires a bun with the perfect--not overpowering!--degree of sweetness, a cheese made with sodium hexametaphosphates, and a meat patty ground in such a way that every strand is aligned to produce an even texture. The meat is then cryofried--dipped in liquid nitrogen and then fried in hot oil--to keep the burger as juicy as possible. It's complicated, but it's still simple (and cheap) compared to a new $325,000 hamburger that will be eaten in London in the near future.

While Modernist Cuisine uses science to find the perfect way to prepare and combine foods, Dr. Mark Post of the Netherlands, creator of this burger, is doing something different--he's trying to prove that we can grow edible meat in a laboratory through the use of stem cells.

Photo credit: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

"In a lab with incubators filled with clear plastic containers holding a pinkish liquid, a technician was tending to the delicate task of growing the tens of billions of cells needed to make the burger, starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse," writes The New York Times. "Dr. Post, one of a handful of researchers in the field, has made strides in developing cultured meat through the use of stem cells — precursor cells that can turn into others that are specific to muscle, for example — and techniques adapted from medical research for growing tissues and organs, a field known as tissue engineering...His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue 'tastes reasonably good.' For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper."

Growing the meat for a lab burger isn't cheap--the research has cost $325,000 so far, which means Post's technique poses little threat to the existing meat business. It's a slow process. Post's work uses myosatellite cells, taken from the muscle tissues in a cow's neck. He uses myosatellite cells because they're able to produce new muscle tissue. The cells are placed in a growth medium--in this case, fetal calf serum--and then encouraged to divide and multiply.

GeoGuesser is my favorite kind of mash up. It shows you a random street corner somewhere in the world using Google Street View images. Your goal is to figure out where you are, using only the cues in the Street View images. Then place your guess on a map. The closer you are to the actual location, the higher you score.

The most difficult guesses for me have been long, desolate stretches of country roads, like the one pictured above. Give it a try, then let me know what your best tips for sussing out the right spots in the comments below. (via Kottke)

The red barns that dot the American countryside are, more often than not, painted red. They're not red because they would otherwise be too hard to see--they're big buildings. They're not red to be fashionable. They're red because red paint is historically the cheapest. And the next logical question--if you haven't dozed off thinking about barns and red paint--is why red is the cheapest. And that question, as answered by Google's Yonatan Zunger in a Google+ post and picked up by BoingBoing, is actually fascinating. Red paint is cheap because of billions of years of nuclear fusion.

Photo credit: Flickr user swainboat via Creative Commons.

Heavy, right? Zunger titled his post "How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars," but before he arrives at his explanation, he offers a crash course in how colors work and how we create paints. Nuclear fusion comes into play when he gets into the root of how and why pigments are formed. But at the high level, we have to start with paints; paints are formed by the combination of a pigment, typically formed from a mineral, and a binding agent, like an oil or acrylic, that makes the liquid stick to something when it dries.

Zunger first posed this question: what makes a good, cheap pigment? "To be a good pigment, first and foremost, something has to have a nice, bright color," he wrote. "The way pigments produce color is that light shines on them, and they absorb some, but not all, of the colors of light. (Remember that white light is a mixture of many colors of light) For example, red ochre, a.k.a. hematite, a.k.a. anhydrous iron oxide (Fe2O3), absorbs yellow, green and blue light, so the light that reflects off of it is reddish-orange. (This happens to be the pigment that’s used in barn paint, so we’re going to come back to it.) Light is absorbed when a photon (a particle of light) strikes an electron in the pigment and is absorbed, transferring its energy to the electron. But quantum mechanics tells us that an electron can’t absorb just any amount of energy: the particular energies (and therefore colors) that it can absorb depend on the layout of the electrons in the material, which in turn depends on its chemistry."

Photo credit: Flickr user hiddenson via Creative Commons.

His explanation of quantum mechanics gets more involved at this point, but here's the most important part: the rotational speed of an atom's outermost electrons affect its ability to become a pigment. There are fixed increments of this property, called angular momentum, and this shows up in the periodic table in different blocks of elements. The only one we really care about is the "d" block, which is the big section in the middle. The "d" electrons produce an amount of energy that corresponds with visual light. These elements, then, tend to make for excellent pigments.

Now we get to the good stuff: Why red pigments are cheap.

It takes a very special baseball pitcher to throw a 100 mile per hour fastball. 90 miles per hour? That's a breeze. 95? A whole bunch of them can do that. But when you top 100 miles per hour, the list thins out. Experts estimate that baseball legend Nolan Ryan threw the fastest pitch of all time--108 miles per hour--in 1974. There's a reason Ryan and fellow blazing-fast-fastball pitcher Randy Johnson own the top two spots on the all-time strikeout leaderboard: It's really tough to track, much less hit, something moving at 100 miles per hour.

Photo credit: Flickr user sidehike via Creative Commons.

There's science to back that up. There’s a 100 millisecond delay between the moment your eyes see an object and the moment your brain registers it," writes Surprising Science. "As a result, when a batter sees a fastball flying by at 100 mph, it’s already moved an additional 12.5 feet by the time his or her brain has actually registered its location."

Some researchers at Berkeley decided to find out. They put subjects through an fMRI to figure out which parts of the brain are responsible for predictive vision. A summary of the study's results says "Findings suggest that the middle temporal region of the visual cortex known as V5 is computing where moving objects are most likely to end up."

The researchers used the test below, which uses a moving background to trick the brain into thinking a stationary object is sliding around.

Here's what's happening when you watch that video: