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For decades, misbehaving students in our culture could expect to be sent to detention, a form of punishment that is meant to discipline the unruly child: a practice that sometimes works, and sometimes does not. But one elementary school in Maryland saw that a form of negative punishment might not necessarily be the best approach to correcting negative behavior in young children, and instead sends its pint-sized perpetrators to a special meditation class instead.
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A new study that employs global positioning system measurements has revealed that the Greenland ice sheet is melting much faster than what previous estimates indicated, by roughly 7.6 percent. Previous estimates pegged the amount of ice loss between 2003 and 2013 at 2,500 billion tons, but the new study corrects this to 2,700 billion tons — a major factor in estimating the rate of future sea level rise.
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Modern science assumes that our consciousness is generated solely by electro-chemical processes in the brain, a fortunate byproduct of billions of neurons recording and processing sensory information as it comes in. But that view comes into question if one take into account stories from ancient traditions of astral travel, and more modern accounts of out-of-body experiences by individuals that live at the edge of reality as we know it. But how can we determine which of these views is correct, or if there is a shade of gray involved somewhere between the two? Perhaps the answer, or maybe an even better question, can come from rare cases where otherwise normal individuals have what might be considered insufficient brain matter to properly function.
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In 360 BCE, the philosopher Plato discussed the nature of consciousness, addressing it as a real phenomenon that could be considered a part of reality, because of its ability to both affect and be affected by other consciousnesses. This simple concept places consciousness, something that is on one hand ubiquitous to the human experience, and on the other remains one of the most elusive phenomenon known in terms of our inability to not only quantify it, but also to prove it exists in the first place. However, researchers at the University of Wisconsin have made a step towards making consciousness a quantifiable phenomenon, where science may be able to address it in a more direct fashion.
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