For the sake of clarity, let us consider the two widely known, nonsensical scenarios: The first is one that many scientists charge ‘idealist’ philosophers with, although no thinker beyond the dorm room bong level holds this view: All is just a dream and there is no physical world. The second nonsensical scenario is that a physical world “really exists independently out there” and it happens to be the case that consciousness arises in it although it could have conceivably been otherwise, a physical universe just being without consciousness.

Credit: EPA

By Uli Beisel, Bayreuth University

Despite it being nearly six months after the Ebola outbreak was confirmed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), we are still hearing stories of severe shortage of gloves in health facilities in West Africa. Many nurses have been asked to reuse them or merely rub their hands with chlorine after consultations.

Image credit:  Ph0neutria via shutterstock

By: Benjamin Plackett, Inside Science

(Inside Science) — Until last year, website designers had a choice of just 22 Internet domains to use as suffixes at the end of URLs, excluding country-specific ones. The familiar “dot-com” and “dot-org” hail from the Reagan era, and the trickle of new domains since has usually been met with much discussion and occasionally debate or even discontent.

Fears of cholera coming shared a lot in common with fear of Ebola. Graetz 1883 © Historical Society of Pennsylvania

By Sally Sheard, University of Liverpool

On October 19 an inspector sent north from London to Sunderland reported a long-awaited arrival: the first British case of cholera.

It was 1831 and as part of a second pandemic cholera had again progressed from its Bengal heartland through Europe, before reaching the Baltic ports. It was only a matter of time.

When most people think of first responders, they think of paramedics or combat medics or other medically-trained personnel doing CPR and other life-saving procedures in stressful situations.

They do not think of acupuncture.
 
A review article in Medical Acupuncture - since it is a review, it is collating other articles about acupuncture, rather than science or medicine - argues that first responders should be trained in integrative medicine approaches such as acupuncture, hypnosis and biofeedback to provide adjunctive treatment to help relieve patients' pain and stress. Maybe they could teach some yoga and the benefits of organic food during the next earthquake as well.

We assume that we can see the world around us in sharp detail but our eyes only process a fraction of our surroundings precisely.

In a series of experiments, psychologists at Bielefeld University investigated how the brain fools us into believing that we see in sharp detail. They find that our nervous system uses past visual experiences to predict how blurred objects would look in sharp detail.

Its central finding is that our nervous system uses past visual experiences to predict how blurred objects would look in sharp detail.

Better get our heads out of the sand and run. Credit: Peter Byrne/PA

By Erik Bichard, University of Salford

The consistent message from those who would seek to exploit shale gas is that it has three distinct advantages over existing forms of fossil fuel energy: it is cheap, it has a lower influence on global warming, and it reduces the reliance in foreign imports.

Computer chips with superconducting circuits would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today's chips due to a lack of electrical resistance.

That means less heat, less deformation and less energy cost.

Superconducting chips also promise greater processing power. Superconducting circuits that use so-called Josephson junctions have been clocked at 770 gigahertz, or 500 times the speed of the chip in the iPhone 6.

Modern day kangaroos exhibit a hopping form of locomotion. Credit: Leo/Flickr, CC BY-SA

By Christine Janis, Brown University

Extinct giant kangaroos may have been built more for walking, rather than hopping like today’s kangaroos, especially when moving slowly.

DNA analysis has become increasingly cost-effective since the human genome was first fully sequenced in the year 2001.

Sequencing a complete genome, however, still costs around $1,000 each so sequencing the genetic code of 100s of individuals would be expensive. For non-human studies, researchers very quickly hit the limit of financial feasibility.