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In Motor Learning, New Brain Connections Form Rapidly
Science Daily has a report on research demonstrating directly that new connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task. A team lead by researchers at UC Santa Cruz performed "...detailed observations of the rewiring processes that take place in the brain during motor learning. The researchers studied mice as they were trained to reach through a slot to get a seed. They observed rapid growth of... synapses between nerve cells in the motor cortex... The study used mice that had been genetically altered to make a fluorescent protein within certain neurons in the brain. The researchers were then able to use a special microscopy technique (two-photon microscopy) to obtain clear images of those neurons near the surface of the brain. The noninvasive imaging technique enabled them to view changes in individual brain cells of the mice before, during, and after the mice were trained in the seed-reaching task."
I think you mean artificial neural networks (ANNs). Yes, they are supposed to be similar to biological brains but the devil is in the details. There is some question, at least among computer scientists, about _exactly_ how the biobrain does it. Gerald Edelman put forward some interesting ideas in the book _Neural_Darwinism_. Ken Stanley has been working on something called NEAT for many years, building on it with Compositional Pattern Producing Networks.
Refining our observations of how nature does it may help produce better artificial neural networks, among other things...
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Seems like another unnecessary piece of legislation. In my opinion, just jacking gas up to reasonable rates (say, $6 to $6 per gallon, somewhere in the vicinity of the rest of the world) and using the tax brought in with that measure for roads and public transit would help a great deal more, while allowing those 30% of station wagon drivers who actually require the space to choose for themselves if they want or don't want to pay up.
Fair enough. Public transit only really works in dense urban areas though, and since America has a lot more land available (LA County would cover all of London and out to the coast to the east and south) its public transportation systems tend to likewise suck. I actually like public transportation, but even when I lived in the Bay Area, which has one of the most developed public transit systems, it would take 3.5 hours on the BART to get somewhere that was about 45 minutes by car, with traffic. LA public transportation is even worse, and they've been investing heavily in public transportatio instead of highways for the last 30 years. All they got out of it was a road system that was hopelessly snarled compared with the contiguous Orange County, which took the opposite approach. The transition from LA to OC on the interstate is like waking up from a nightmare.
In places like downtown Manhattan, though, public transit works quite fine, because it is dense enough to make sense.
If we're concerned with CO2 emissions, we can halve our national CO2 output in America simply by switching to nuclear power. The outlay on this (I've run the numbers myself) would range between $400B and $4T at current prices (though when building plants en masse and providing liability protection would likely put the cost around $300B), and would allow us to meet all conceivable CO2 goals without making the utterly impractical approach of trying to get people to stop driving. People won't change their habits.
I'm giving a guest lecture on global warming tomorrow at a local college, and the students know this, so I'm going to poll them how many drove to the school vs. biked or walked, as well as how many think global warming is a serious problem. If my experience is right, about 75% will think it's a problem, and yet all of them will have driven anyway.
>>Being European, I'm also not that familiar with the Clean Air Act, but seeing how the DMCA, CAN-SPAM or the Various Wars on Stuff are working out, I can imagine expense and results.
Similar measures were taken in England, to get rid of the killer smog that was killing thousands of people every year. Not saying that was bad (nobody wants to live next to a dirty smokestack), but all the particulate matter we were throwing into the year wasn't just stopping the global warming from the CO2, but was actually causing a decrease in global temperatures. When filters were put on, you can measure the corresponding decrease in atmospheric particulate count, and global temperatures started rising quite swiftly after that. I can provide references if you'd like, I have them all on hand for the lecture I'm prepping right now.