/pragmatica/

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. Distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex tracked estimation errors when those called for positive update, both in individuals who scored high and low on trait optimism. However, highly optimistic individuals exhibited reduced tracking of estimation errors that called for negative update in right inferior prefrontal gyrus. These findings indicate that optimism is tied to a selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.

“Richard Dawkins has no sense of irony. He rails endlessly against fundamentalists yet he defends old-fashioned, Thomas Gradgrind-style materialism as zealously as the Mid-West Creationists defend the literal truth of Genesis. He accuses others of misrepresentation yet he seriously misrepresents religion. Also, which is irony writ large, he misrepresents science, in whose name he is assumed to speak. He condemns the Catholics for filling the heads of children with a particular view of life before they have had a chance to think for themselves – and now, in The Magic of Reality, written for readers as young as nine, he has done precisely that.”

An international team of scientists at CERN has just announced that they’ve recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light.

“The flare is in fact a high-energy jet of radiation produced by a star falling into a black hole at the center of a galaxy 4 billion light-years away.”

For decades, researchers have been putting general relativity to the test. The theory has held up so far, but any deviation from expectations, however small, could point to an overhaul of physics.

The question is very simple: do matter and antimatter obey the same laws of physics? That’s a very simple question, but a very profound one.

At the heart of the experiment is one of the weirdest, and most important, tenets of quantum mechanics: the principle that empty space is anything but. Quantum theory predicts that a vacuum is actually a writhing foam of particles flitting in and out of existence.

Although equal quantities of matter and antimatter are thought to have been created in the Big Bang, we see almost no antimatter in today’s Universe. This asymmetry not only implies a cosmic favouritism for matter, but also suggests that physics does not always work the same way when time is run backwards instead of forwards.