Why We Become Friends With Genetically Similar People

It makes sense that we choose friends based on compatibility. I mean, why would we want to form relationships with people who disagree with everything we say or do?

As you grow, you may absolutely find the importance of creating a circle of friends whose perspectives differ from yours, and in fact, interacting with people with opposing viewpoints can be incredibly beneficial to your overall growth, from you how you interact and respond to others to your actual outlook on life.

The more experiences you have, the more openminded you become. However, having friends who share genuine interests makes life joyous. To share interests and activities with another person — to eat certain foods, play certain sports, listen to certain music, and so on — is a beautiful, communal, and enriching thing. But have you ever considered the science behind why we choose our friends?

According to a recent study, led by Nicholas Christakis, a professor of sociology and medicine at Yale University, and James Fowler, a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, our friends seem to be genetically more similar to us than strangers.

For their findings, which were published in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team of researchers analyzed the genomes of 1,932 people, and compared pairs of friends with pairs of strangers.

The study discovered that, on average, every person had more similar DNA with their friends than with strangers. The researchers suggested that such an outcome points to our tendency to make friends who share similar racial backgrounds.

The study concluded that, on overage, our friends can be compared to our fourth cousins genetically, which means that we share an estimated 1% of our genes with our friends.

And as Christakis explained, “1% does not sound a big deal, but it is for geneticists. It is noteworthy that most people do not even know who their fourth cousins are, but somehow, from the countless possible cases, we choose to make friends with people who are genetically similar to us.”

Christakis and Fowler also created a “friendship score” in order to predict who will befriend whom at nearly the same level of confidence scientists have for predicting a person’s chance of obesity or schizophrenia on the basis of genes.

The team found that, in relation to individual genes, friends are more likely to have similar genes related to the sense of smell, but different genes that control immunity. This led them to conclude that friends are relatively more dissimilar in their genetic protection against various diseases. Such an evolutionary mechanism — having connections to people who are capable of withstanding different pathogens — can serve society in general, since it reduces interpersonal spread of disease. But it is still unclear how we select people to gain this immunological benefit.

The study discovered that genes that were more similar between friends seem to be evolving faster than other genes. According to Christakis, such findings may reveal why human evolution seems to have accelerated over the past 30,000 years.

Christakis also noted that “new research reinforces the notion that humans are ‘transgenic’ beings, not only because of the bacteria that live on/in/around us, but because of the people who surround us. It seems that our capacity depends not only on our genetic composition, but also on the genetic composition of our friends.”

via Collective - Evolution

Your Favourite Music Can Get You High – Sort Of

We think of music as art, as entertainment, and as a pastime. It’s personal; it’s communal. Music is one of those things that, for many of us, can ignite innumerable feelings and memories in just one song, or even one verse alone. Throughout history, music was used for medicinal purposes, and research today has demonstrated that therapeutic value.

But now, new research suggests music could even get you high.

Without even knowing the findings, think about how you can relate to this idea. When you’re feeling stressed out, motivated or unmotivated, angry, sad, happy, celebratory, etc., music may be one of your favourite tools for heightening the emotions you’re feeling, or shifting them. According to the new study, this emotional response happens because music activates a chemical reward system in the brain — the same one that makes delicious food, intense exercise, and opioid drugs feel great.

Though the brain’s reward system can cause us to feel amazing, it can also lead us down a rabbit hole of detrimental habits, like overeating, overexercising, and drug addiction. But if we can gain control over this system, we can learn to avoid such behaviors and reap the benefits of the positive aspect of the high.

The study tested how naltrexone, a drug that diminishes the effects of opioids in the brain and is therefore used primarily to treat drug and alcohol addiction, affects musical enjoyment. Conducted by researchers at McGill University, the research required 15 students to pick between two different pieces of music they loved, and that gave them chills, and bring them into the lab.

The subjects were then given either naltrexone or a placebo. After an hour, the students listened to their music of choice, along with two “neutral” songs selected by the scientists. While the music played, the students used a slider to measure their form of pleasure in relation to a specific song.

Sensors also measured electrical activity in their facial muscles. Prior to exiting the lab, the participants also took a survey regarding their reactions. After a week, the subjects were put through the same test, except the naltrexone group received placebos and vice versa.

The results revealed that participants moved their facial muscles less with naltrexone in their system, which suggests that it had reduced their emotional response to what they were hearing. This was found for both positive and negative emotions: the highs felt lower, and the lows felt higher.

The sliders implemented in the study revealed that the subjects’ pleasure lessened when listening to their favourite music as a result of the naltrexone, but this did not have an effect on their feelings about the neutral music.

The research suggests that, much like it does for exercise, food, and drugs, naltrexone seems to prompt a low response to music, which backs up the theory that the same reward system in the brain accounts for our reactions to all of them.

The study authors concluded, “The current experimental finding of reduced response from both the positive and negative valence EMGs (ZYG and COR respectively) reinforces the notion that music is complex and rarely conveys a single emotional valence. Listeners more often report finding music to be bittersweet than purely happy or purely sad, and many listeners report that even sad music brings them pleasure.”

via Collective - Evolution

Stanford Engineers Designed A Low-Cost Battery For Storing Renewable Energy

Stanford University researchers have created a new battery that could change the way we look at renewable energy storage forever.

The team used urea, an affordable, natural, and readily-available material present in mammal urine and fertilizers to create a battery that is significantly more efficient than past versions.

Stanford chemistry professor Hongjie Dai and doctoral candidate Michael Angell developed the nonflammable battery, which contains electrodes made from abundant aluminum and graphite.

“So essentially, what you have is a battery made with some of the cheapest and most abundant materials you can find on Earth. And it actually has good performance,” explained Dai. “Who would have thought you could take graphite, aluminum, urea, and actually make a battery that can cycle for a pretty long time?”

Dai’s lab created the first rechargeable aluminum battery in 2015 to astonishing effect: a system that charged in less than a minute, and which lasted thousands of charge-discharge cycles. The lab teamed up with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to use the battery to power a motorbike, winning a 2016 R&D 100 Award for their groundbreaking results.

This original version, though impressive, involved an expensive electrolyte. The newest version, on the other hand, implements a urea-based electrolyte and is an estimated 100 times cheaper than the 2015 model. It also has higher efficiency and a charging time of just 45 minutes. Dai noted that the cost difference between the two batteries is “like night and day.”

Dai and Angell’s work marks the first time urea has been used in a battery.

The low-cost battery is even more impressive in a day and age when the demand for renewable technologies continues to grow. Energy storage has proved a massive challenge for solar power and other renewables, with users requiring a reliable way to store power when their systems aren’t generating energy.

This demand provokes the need for cheap and efficient batteries to store the energy for release at night. The batteries currently on the market, such as the lithium-ion or lead acid batteries, are both expensive as well as limited in their lifespans.

Dai and Angell’s battery may be the answer to this storage issue.

“It’s cheap. It’s efficient. Grid storage is the main goal,” Angell noted.

Grid storage, according to Angell, is the most realistic goal thanks to the battery’s low cost, high efficiency, and long cycle life. The Coulombic efficiency, a measurement of how much charge exits the battery per unit of charge that it takes in during charging, proved high for this battery, coming in at 99.7%. Another important attribute is Dai’s urea battery’s low risk factor. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, for instance, this new battery is not flammable.

“I would feel safe if my backup battery in my house is made of urea with little chance of causing fire,” Dai noted.

The team has licensed the battery patents to AB Systems, which Dai founded. And currently, a commercial version of the batter is underway.

The researchers believe this battery could allow for solar energy to be stored in every building and every home. “Maybe it will change everyday life,” admits Dai.

via Collective - Evolution

Entirely New ‘Continent’ Discovered On Earth, It’s Huge & Hidden In The Pacific Ocean

In school, we are taught some basic things that never seem to change, like the fact that one plus one equals two, there are five (or is it six?) vowels in the English language, and there are seven continents on Planet Earth.

But the last of those examples is getting a major makeover thanks to a team of 11 researchers who found that Earth has a concealed continent called “Zealandia” that’s hidden in the Pacific Ocean and attached to New Zealand.

The newly published research concluded that New Zealand and New Caledonia are actually part of a huge 4.9 million sq km (1.89 million square-mile) single slab of continental crust that is unhinged from Australia.

Published by the Geological Society of America, the study discovered that the region is 94% submerged, mostly due to crustal thinning before the supercontinental break-up. For their findings, the team used upgraded satellite-based elevation and gravity map technology.

“The scientific value of classifying Zealandia as a continent is much more than just an extra name on a list,” the scientists explained. “That a continent can be so submerged yet unfragmented makes it a useful and thought-provoking geodynamic end member in exploring the cohesion and breakup of continental crust.”

This kind of reminds me of hearing that Pluto was a planet, and then that Pluto wasn’t a planet, and then… it’s hard to keep up. However, the team says Zealandia should be considered a geological continent, which really just makes me question everything we think we know about geology. But really, how human of us to not have all the answers, right?

The researchers said the continent used to be considered a collection of continental islands and fragments.

“Based on various lines of geological and geophysical evidence, particularly those accumulated in the last two decades, we argue that Zealandia is not a collection of partly submerged continental fragments but is a coherent 4.9 Mkm2 continent,” the study said.

So does this mean their are eight continents? Not exactly. According to geologists, Europe and Asia are one giant continent they refer to as “Eurasia,” which means the new addition of Zealandia brings the number of continents to seven — which is the number we’ve become accustomed to.

Geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk coined the name Zealandia back in 1995 to refer to the two islands and other submerged pieces of crust that once separated from Gondwana. Of the new findings, in which he did not take part, he said, “These people here are A-list earth scientists. I think they have put together a solid collection of evidence that’s really thorough. I don’t see that there’s going to be a lot of pushback, except maybe around the edges.”

The researchers are referring to Zealandia as a “realization” rather than a “discovery,” since New Zealand has been considered a continent by some experts in the field for years.

“This is not a sudden discovery but a gradual realisation; as recently as 10 years ago we would not have had the accumulated data or confidence in interpretation to write this paper,” the study’s authors said. “Zealandia illustrates that the large and the obvious in natural science can be overlooked.”

via Collective - Evolution

Los Alamos Study Finds Airport Scanners Can Rip Apart & Alter DNA

Can we ever believe what our government tells us about airport security devices?

Apparently not. First they told us those X-ray scanners (that showed way too many naked body parts) were perfectly safe.

Even the manufacturer of the device, Rapidscan, openly admitted the scanners had not been adequately tested. The truth was later revealed that the safety tests turned out to be totally rigged, as reported by Natural News.

With fabricated results, the technology was quickly rushed into every airport worldwide. No one listened to what the scientists in the field of radiation were trying to tell them – it’s not safe.

It wasn’t until the backscatter radiation levels the scanners were putting off began showing an increased incidence of cancer in TSA agents (along with the lawsuits that quickly followed), that the devices were finally yanked. The TSA quickly scrambled for another solution.

Now they also want us to believe that the replacement technology, millimeter wave “digital strip search” scanners, are also “perfectly safe”.

Don’t believe it for a second. The TSA failed to adequately test these devices for health and safety factors as well. Unfortunately, in today’s world, security trumps human safety.

These millimeter wave technologies are designed to bombard innocent travelers with high frequency energy particles known as terahertz photons.

A study conducted by Boian S. Alexandrov et.al. at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, revealed that these terahertz waves could “…unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication.”

In other words, this study is the smoking gun that raises serious concerns about the impact of terahertz radiation upon fertility, fetal development, and cancer.

Now think about the thousands of people who are subjected to these levels of untested energy particles every day in the name of “National Security”.

The military’s Active Denial weapon uses millimeter wave technology to create an intense burning sensation on the skin’s surface using a 95 GHz (3.2mm wavelength) beam.

But the TSA tells us not to worry about their millimeter waves because:

“Millimeter wave technology bounces harmless electromagnetic waves off the body to create the same generic image for all passengers.” 

This is completely inaccurate because the nature of millimeter waves is that our bodies and water are excellent absorbers of these waves. Millimeter waves do penetrate and absorb into our skin.

At the microwave technology center in Malaysia, health subjects were exposed to microwave radiation between 20 — 38 GHz, the range in which the TSA scanners operate.

They found that millimeter waves penetrated the subject’s skin at depths of between 1.05 mm at 20 GHz to 0.78 mm at 38 GHz. This is enough to penetrate below the epidermal layer of the skin.

Millimeter waves have been reported to produce a variety of bioeffects, many of which are quite unexpected from radiation penetrated less than 1 mm into biological tissues.

Of particular concern is the citing of studies that show there is an irreversible water memory effect by millimeter waves operating in the 36GHz frequency, and that the millimeter wave effects on blood plasma vary greatly from one person to the next.

Does this information make you extremely uncomfortable? Well, it should. And it should also make every one of us mad as hell.

Since the day they first rolled out these human violation technologies in 2007, I have always chosen to “opt out”. I would rather endure the intrusive body pat down any day than subject myself to covert DNA alteration.

So what if it takes an additional 5-15 minutes of your time getting to your gate? It’s time to exercise your own personal body health consciousness, since the US government has clearly demonstrated they don’t possess any qualms about not protecting you.

Alternation of DNA can be subtle and deadly down the line. Who would ever make the connection that a TSA scanning machine might have contributed to any negative health effects you eventually experience.

If you are a frequent air traveler, like myself, you should be concerned about your levels of exposure. If you’re a TSA agent, you should find another job.

This past weekend as I was trying to make a flight back to Los Angeles from the Columbia, South Carolina Airport, I did my usual “opt out” thing. The TSA agents from this little backwater airport tried to feed me the propaganda line about “minimal risk.”

I told them I’d read the studies and they needed to be better informed. They looked at me blankly trying to tell me it was just like using a cell phone. Not true.

The millimeter wave scanners the TSA operates put out more than 20 billion times more oscillations per second in smaller terahertz waves, so the cellular effects will be different from cell phones.

I’m sure no one ever told TSA agents this, but they feed the same lies back to the people that they’ve been told, so I tried to be more forgiving.

I’m sure no one had requested an opt out for some time in this South Carolina airport, which is why I got the pat down of all pat downs.

The female agent made sure to give me karate chops straight up to my private parts twice in the back and then another two times in the front. Totally unnecessary. She kneaded my waist in a strange manner, grabbing hold of any loose skin she could find.

I have had hundreds of pat downs over the years, and no one, I mean no one, has ever been as intrusive as this TSA agent.

My first instinct was to tell her how inappropriate she was being, then I remembered how I would most likely be punished for my non-sheep-like behavior and not be allowed to make my flight.

During the procedure she also sniffled and sneezed, spreading her germ warfare all over me through out the entire security grope session.

I think we have all had enough of this undignified treatment in the name of security. It’s already been proven that these scanner devices and intrusive pat downs have not made our world any safer from terrorists.

Airport security testers have snuck through everything from guns to explosives, clearly proving their ineffectiveness. Metal detectors should be sufficient enough.

If everyone opted out of the scanner, the whole program would eventually fall apart. The lines of opt outs would be so long it would bring the air travel industry to a standstill.

It would also send a clear message that unsafe devices are not going to be tolerated. Take the extra time and just do it — opt out. If you love yourself, than you owe it to yourself.

Now I’m already ahead of you on what you’re thinking — that they’ll just suspend all our civil liberties and make it mandatory to go through the scanners whether we want to or not.

Well, I would like to believe that they would be flooded with lawsuits if they did, but there’s an even easier solution. Go to a medical supply store and buy a cheap inexpensive arm sling and put it on before going through TSA.

If you can’t hold both arms up over your head while in their scanner, it renders the results totally unusable. They know this and have to let you opt out for medical reasons. The sheeple are getting smarter. Afterall, life is all about how you handle Plan B.

Dr. Kathy Forti  is a clinical psychologist, inventor of the Trinfinity8 technology, and author of the book, Fractals of God.

via Collective - Evolution

Why Elon Musk Thinks Automation Will Force Governments To Introduce Universal Basic Income

Recently, Elon Musk had the chance to share his thoughts on universal basic income (UBI) at the World Government Summit in Dubai. At the Summit, Musk had the opportunity to talk about the future, and the challenges the world will face in the next hundred years – including artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and the job displacement expected to come with it.

When asked about the challenges civilization is set to face in the near future, Musk began by noting the threat of artificial intelligences that surpass humanity.

He stated, “deep artificial intelligence, or artificial general intelligence, where you can have artificial intelligence that is much smarter than the smartest human on Earth, this is a dangerous situation.”

He continued by noting the importance of advancing our research into AI with caution: “I think we need to be very careful in how we adopt artificial intelligence and that we make sure that researchers don’t get carried away. Sometimes what will happen is a scientist will get so engrossed in their work that they don’t really realize the ramifications of what they’re doing.”

Musk also relayed concerns that autonomous technology will impact jobs, and he noted that we will likely have intelligent, massive-scale automation for transportation relatively soon—within the next few decades, in fact: “Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed,” he said, pointing out the extent of how automation will disrupt car-based transportation specifically.

However, displacement due to automation isn’t just limited to transportation, it will sweep across a number of industries, and Musk argues that the government must introduce a UBI program in order to compensate for this. “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” he said. “I think it’s going to be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”

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