What nonsense!

Via the Telegraph:

Children will learn by downloading information directly into their brains within 30 years, the head of Britain's top private schools organisation has predicted.
Chris Parry, the new chief executive of the Independent Schools Council, said "Matrix-style" technology would render traditional lessons obsolete.
He told the Times Educational Supplement: "It's a very short route from wireless technology to actually getting the electrical connections in your brain to absorb that knowledge."
Mr Parry, a former Rear Admiral, spent three years determining the future strategic context for the military in a senior role at the Ministry of Defence.
He is now preparing the ISC's 1,300 private schools, which collectively teach half a million children, for a high-tech future.
He told the TES that the Keanu Reeves thriller may not look like science fiction in 30 years' time.
"Within 30 years, sitting down and learning something will be a thing of the past," Mr Parry said.
"I think people will be able to directly access, Matrix-style, all the vocabulary you need for a foreign language, leaving you just to clear up the grammar."

Statements like this were made in the early days of computing and robotics. When the calculational potential of strings of ones and zeroes was discovered and then implemented electronically, it was presumed that the brain:computer analogy was very strong, and it was only a matter of time before computers could think themselves or that humans could think in a manner assisted very directly by machines. Mr Parry's assertion is slightly different - he seems to think that wireless technology can enable the fast and permanent transfer of information from the computer to the brain. However, he doesn't seem to appreciate how different human knowing is from the storage of information on a computer. Setting aside the philosophical question of the human soul and its role in human knowing, I think his presumption that somehow foreign language vocabulary could be transferred from computer to brain, in such a way that it links up with the student's knowledge of his native language (or alternatively with the student's knowledge of the world around him) is nonsensical. Additionally, why he thinks that this might be possible, but that grammar would not be portable in this manner suggests that he knows very little about languages, computers and brains.

Love onions? Too macho to cry?

Scientists have the answer:

A tear-free onion that should be tastier and healthier has been created by using genetic tinkering to turn off the enzyme that makes us cry.
The onions, which can be chopped without painful, stingy, weeping eyes, have been tested in the laboratory by New Zealand Crop & Food Research scientist Dr Colin Eady, with his collaborators in Japan.
"If the research progresses well, would like to see them become the household and industry norm within the next decade," says Dr Eady.
The research team has been unable to induce tearing by crushing their model tearless onions, which emerged from a discovery by Japanese scientists of the gene behind the tears. "When you slice the vegetable, it doesn't produce tears."
The key is not to introduce a foreign gene but to silence one using a phenomenon called RNA interference. By stopping sulphur compounds from being converted to the tearing agent and redirecting them into compounds responsible for flavour and health, the process could even improve the onion.

Sensory Deprivation

An interesting report in the Times:

[A] new televised experiment reveals how badly the brain is affected if isolation is complete and there is no sensory stimulation. It can take just hours for us to become more forgetful, worse at problem-solving, worse at finding words and, perhaps most worrying of all, more open to suggestion from other people. The findings may have implications for how we bring up children, look after the elderly and treat prisoners.
Next week’s Horizon on BBC Two recreates an experiment in sensory deprivation so controversial that it hasn’t been conducted for 40 years. Six volunteers were observed as they spent 48 hours completely isolated in pitch-black rooms, unable to see or hear anything. These are the sort of conditions endured by hostages such as Brian Keenan, who was isolated for eight months during his four-year captivity in Beirut, which ended in 1990.
Similar experiments were held in the 1950s, after thousands of American and Canadian prisoners of war had been held in conditions of sensory deprivation during the Korean War. Prompted by frequent accounts of PoWs seeming to have become “brainwashed” and taking on the views of their captors, North American psychologists examined how isolation affected the minds of volunteers. The experiments were closed down because they were deemed too cruel. But now the psychologist Ian Robbins – a professor at the University of Surrey and a specialist in supporting victims of torture, who has treated British detainees from Guantanamo Bay on their release – has reconstructed some of the sensory deprivation experiments in Horizon, but only for short periods, which are unlikely to result in long-term effects for the volunteers.
Before being isolated, the volunteers underwent tests of visual memory (reproducing a complex drawing); information processing (filtering out confusing information); verbal fluency (naming words starting with a certain letter); and suggestibility (how likely they were to accept something their questioner said at face value, without pointing out that it was wrong). Then they spent two days and nights in isolation.
Two of the participants coped well, sleeping through much of the period. All found it profoundly boring; most found it distressing. One young woman became convinced that her sheets were wet even though, when she checked, they were found not to be. Most of the volunteers started pacing their small rooms like caged animals during the second day and felt less and less safe as time went on. Three experienced auditory and visual hallucinations – snakes, piles of oyster shells, tiny cars, zebras.
“It was weird,” said Mickey, a postman. “I started to imagine things; a load of fighter planes buzzing round, a swarm of mosquitoes. I thought the room was taking off at one time. That was frightening.”
Conducting the same tests again, when the “prisoners” were gratefully released after 48 hours, Professor Robbins found that their ability to do even the simplest tasks had deteriorated. Mickey’s memory capacity fell by 36 per cent. All the subjects had trouble thinking even of one or two words beginning with “F”. And all four of the men (though interestingly not the women) were markedly more suggestible.
It’s the last of these findings that Professor Robbins thinks has an immediate social and political relevance. “People being held for questioning in police stations, for example, may be treated humanely, but they get virtually no sensory input,” he says. “If the detention is for short periods of time, I don’t think that’s a problem, but there is talk of extending the period of time for which people can be held on suspicion of terrorist offences. And if people are indeed more suggestible, the longer they are held in isolation, the more that must raise questions about the reliability of their evidence.”

Just because something is scientifically possible...

... that doesn't mean that we should necessarily do it.
Sacrilege from the Times:

A caffeinated bar of soap has been invented for people who are short of time.
Every time a person lathers their body with the soap it produces two coffee cups’ worth of caffeine. The effects are said to be absorbed within five minutes and last for up to four hours. The soap, called Shower Shock, is intended for people who are too busy to make a cup of coffee in the morning. Shower Shock soap is on sale through the US-based internet company Think Geek and costs £3.50.

Inconsistency...

Another example from the Telegraph of a case where the introduction to the story seems to flatly contradict the substance of the article.

We are unable to distinguish right from wrong if we rely on pure logic alone, according to a study that shows how morality is based on feelings.

That's a rather sweeping statement! Let's read on...

Neuroscientists traced abnormal moral choices -notably cold-blooded "utilitarian" judgments where one person's life is sacrificed for the greater good - to damaged emotional circuits, revealing how, in these cases, moral judgment fails without feelings.
This discovery will inform the philosophical debate about the degree to which moral judgements are based on norms or emotions.

This doesn't seem to correspond with the blanket statement with which the story opened.

Our work provides the first causal account of the role of emotions in moral judgments," said co-senior author Prof Marc Hauser of Harvard University. He emphasised that not all moral reasoning depended strongly on emotion. "A wide class of moral judgments are completely normal even without emotional input, showing that we have a cold moral calculus that operates without emotional inspiration," he said.
But for a certain class of moral judgments a small region behind the forehead, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), is important.
The discovery was made by researchers at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Caltech and the University of Iowa after studying six people with damage to the VMPC who behaved in a matter-of-fact way when considering difficult dilemmas.