How Sue Hespos’ baby stole blood from her brain ”¦ and other tales

How Sue Hespos’ baby stole blood from her brain ”¦ and other tales

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Sue Hespos of Northwestern’s Infant Cognition Lab told me a great story that didn’t make it into the first Clever Apes show: Audio Meanwhile, if you want to know more about optical brain imaging, also called near-infrared spectroscopy or NIRS, here’s a paper from Hespos on it. Hespos’ lab has produced a pile of interesting research, much of it on language acquisition. There may be more to come on this in future Apes episodes. Her sister lab, the Project on Child Development under Sandra Waxman, works with slightly older children, and also is cranking out all kinds of cool research. Waxman is, among other things, probing our earliest inklings of concepts like race and death. Hogan

If you want to really understand the Holographic Principle that Craig Hogan is talking about, first go get a Ph.D. Next, become an authority on the Planck length, gravitational waves and black holes. Then drink a couple bottles of cough syrup, throw on The Matrix and hit yourself good and hard on the head with a physics textbook. But if you don’t have time for that, Science News and New Scientist each have pretty good explanations. Interestingly, Craig Hogan and dark matter maestro Erik Ramberg collaborate on various things at Fermilab, including this proposal for a detector called a holometer that Hogan thinks might help figure out if we live in a pixilated universe. Ramberg

And you can also hear (and see) lots more dark matter music from Ramberg’s musical detector. Don’t mind the Enya.