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Our column Emotional Weather Report, Pet Life edition appears in the Philippine Star most Saturdays.

“You’ll be back…with my Friskies. How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t like Whiskas. Friskies! Friskies!”

At Google’s mysterious X laboratory, known to us as Larry and Sergei’s world domination headquarters, scientists connected 16,000 computer processors to try and simulate a human brain.

A minuscule portion of it, the researchers pointed out, as the human brain has a million times more connections—than their network. Repeat: your brain has more synapses and neurons than a network with one billion connections. Essentially, scientists are using vast computer networks to figure out what goes on inside a single human brain. (You really are an underachiever.)
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Summertime: Number 9A by Jackson Pollock

Standing in front of Jackson Pollock’s Summertime: Number 9A one day, I was struck by an unfamiliar feeling. What I once considered an ugly collection of random paint splatters now spoke to me as a joyous celebration of movement and energy, the bright yellow and blue bringing to mind a carefree laugh.

It was my road-to-Damascus moment – the first time a piece of abstract art had stirred my emotions. Like many people, I used to dismiss these works as a waste of time and energy. How could anyone find meaning in what looked like a collection of colourful splodges thrown haphazardly on a 5.5-metre-wide canvas? Yet here I was, in London’s Tate Modern gallery, moved by a Pollock.

Read Get the picture? Art in the brain of the beholder, in New Scientist (Registration required).

Some studies have indeed shown that the right hemisphere seems to be involved more when we have an Aha! flash of insight. For instance, one study found that activity was greater in the right hemisphere when participants solved a task via insight, rather than piecemeal. Another showed that brief exposure to a puzzle clue was more useful to the right hemisphere, than the left, as if the right hemisphere were nearer the answer.

But insight is just one type of creativity. Telling stories is another. One of the most fascinating insights from the split-brain studies was the way the left hemisphere made up stories to explain what the right hemisphere was up to – what Gazzaniga dubbed the “interpreter phenomenon”. For example, in one study, a patient completing a picture-matching task used their left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to match up a shovel with an image of a snow storm (shown only to the right hemisphere). The patient was then asked why he’d done this. But his left hemisphere (the source of speech) didn’t admit to not knowing. Instead, it confabulated, saying that he’d reached for the shovel to clear out the chicken coup (the picture shown to the left hemisphere was of a bird’s foot)…

Why the Right-Brain, Left-Brain Myth Will Probably Never Die by Christian Jarrett in Psychology Today.

Photo: Harvest Moon over the Basilica of Superga by Stefano De Rosa in NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day.

We asked Google, which directed us to Life’s Little Mysteries.

According to physics professor Neil Comins, if the moon hadn’t formed life might not exist. “Huge tides generated by the moon—which orbited much closer to Earth when it formed—washed the chemical building blocks for life from land into the oceans and helped ‘stir up the primordial soup.'”

Also, the days and nights would be much shorter, and any existing creatures would’ve had to migrate frequently to deal with extreme climate changes. Read it here.

Dark-matter filaments, such as the one bridging the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223, are predicted to contain more than half of all matter in the Universe. Jörg Dietrich, University of Michigan/University Observatory Munich

Dark Matter’s tendrils revealed, in Nature.

“In the same week that the detection of the Higgs boson was announced, there was an announcement in Nature that was equally awesome. On the other end of the astronomical scale, the first direct observation of dark matter and its role in the structure of the universe.” Thanks to Butch for the alert.

…like you understand what you’re saying. We’ve read reports on the discovery of the Higgs particle with varying degrees of confusion, but this one from Bad Astronomy is comprehensible.

Don’t call it ‘god particle’. Higgs boson evidence: a graphic showing traces of collision of particles similar to those created in the Large Hadron Collider. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images in the Guardian.

The Higgs particle is extremely important, because the Standard Model of particle physics – the basic idea of how all particles behave – predicts it exists and is what (indirectly) gives many other particles mass. In other words, the reason electrons, protons, and neutrons have mass is because of this Higgs beastie.

So, you have to collide particles over and over again, countless times, to build up that tiny signal from the Higgs decay. The more you do it, the bigger the signal gets, and the more confident you can be that the detection is real…

Read Higgs! at Bad Astronomy.