“Exactly a decade has passed since a man called Oxygen first hurled himself across Amerika. Known for his jumping ability, Oxygen, a lanky Czech, catapulted to legend status by leaping a nearly 10-foot-wide abyss separating two 100-foot sandstone spires. Today, Petr Kops, 21, is wearing Oxygen’s hand-me-down pants. “I did not know Oxygen personally, but my sister did,” Kops said. “I wear his trousers for good luck.”
Minutes later, Kops was standing at the edge of a 70-foot chasm called Broken Bones. He announced that he was about to damage his ankle. Then he jumped. While it may seem suicidal, leaping across a gaping crevasse is actually an extreme sport that is gaining in popularity. Called rock jumping, or simply jumping by the locals, this adrenaline-charged activity is taking place in the Adrspach-Teplice Rocks, a remote nature preserve in the northeast part of the Czech Republic.”
“Being a neurologist in the era of fMRI scanners must feel like being a kid in a candy shop. What’s going in there while we’re, say, shopping? How about reading? Watching campaign ads? Now that we have a way to take real-time images of the brain at work, the scientific possibilities are endless.
On the surface, the experiment at the heart of this story might seem pretty narrow. It focuses on a rare disorder called pseudobulbar affect, which afflicts only people with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease — a far cry from the universal rites of shopping or reading. But what’s fascinating about pseudobulbar is the light it might shed on all of us, and one of the most primal and mysterious human experiences of all: emotion.
People with pseudobulbar get happy and sad, just like the rest of us. They laugh and cry like the rest of us too. But then sometimes, something else happens: They keep going. And going. In this video, you can see how what looks like a laughing fit morphs into something else entirely. It’s as if the laughing and crying mechanisms have become detached from whatever part of the brain triggered the emotion in the first place. Maybe – and this is the hope of scientists Howard Rosen and Robert Levenson – by seeing that disconnect take place in real time through the fMRI, we’ll understand, for the first time, how emotion plays out in people without pseudobulbar affect.”
Making your own outrageous outfit can be time-consuming, so Prepare for the Playa events make it easy to load up on eye-catching gear you won’t find on the shelves at Old Navy. These flea-markets-on-acid are a chance for burner-based businesses to connect, says Nikki Doran, one of the three Prepare for the Playa organizers, but they’re also educational: Playa U how-to workshops put seasoned burners in touch with newbies to go over everything from shower construction and bike lighting to poi-twirling.
Someone sent me this email which seemed very familiar:
“The Red Planet is about to be spectacular! This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter’s gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.
The encounter will culminate on August 27th when Mars comes to within 34,649,589 miles of Earth and will be (next to the moon) the brightest object in the night sky. It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide. At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. At the beginning of August it will rise in the east at 10p.m. and reach its azimuth at about 3 a.m.
By the end of August when the two planets are closest , Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30a.m.That’s pretty convenient to see something that no human being has seen in recorded history. So, mark your calendar at the beginning of August to see Mars grow progressively brighter and brighter throughout the month. Share this with your children and grandchildren. NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN!”
The reason it seemed familiar was because someone else sent me this last year. It’s a hoax folks. So all you astronomy buffs…fogettaboutit.
“Many academic health centers offer programs that include traditional Chinese treatments or Ayurvedic medicine from India. The University of New Mexico goes beyond that, says management of its new Center for Life. “The uniqueness of our program is that we not only embrace Eastern and Western philosophies, but we try to integrate the traditions of New Mexico,” said Dr. Arti Prasad, the center’s director. Thus, Native American healers and Hispanic curanderas are invited to work with patients at the clinic.
The Center for Life, which opened Friday, offers what Prasad prefers to call “complementary medicine” - augmenting modern medicine with practices and treatments that may go back thousands of years in other cultures. The philosophy has its basis in preventing disease, what Prasad describes as “keeping the body in balance, staying healthy, exercising, eating healthy and doing good things in your life.” Western medicine works to find disease early with such tests as mammograms, while Eastern medicine steps in earlier to try to prevent disease, she said. If there’s an imbalance in the body and a person becomes ill, Eastern medicine tries to get the body back in balance, she said.
The center’s physicians work with yoga instructors, doctors of Oriental medicine or hypnotherapists “to achieve one goal of health and wellness in our patients,” said Prasad, a native of India who graduated from conventional Western medical schools but grew up with traditional folk medicine as part of the Indian lifestyle.”
One might be the misjudgments of probability that lead us to search for explanations where none is required. If so sheep should have a poorer understanding of probability than goats. This prediction had largely held (Blackmore and Troscianko 1985, Blackmore 1992) and, after many years, given me the gratifying sense of actually making some progress that I never got when I was searching for psi.
I have done other research and writing, on psi in the ganzfeld, ESP in children, the Tarot, lucid dreams, meditation and on consciousness. If there is any underlying thread it is the attempt to understand exceptional human experiences, as Rhea has so aptly named them, without recourse to the psi hypothesis. I now see my early hunt for psi as doomed to failure and my return to the experiences themselves as far more useful. […]
There is simply a vast range of exceptional human experiences; experiences that terrify or uplift us, and experiences that seem to carry mystical insights of extraordinary clarity and realness. If the scientific method can ever shine light on these experiences then that is what I am trying to do.
For my part, I’m most interested now in living the human experience (”exceptional” or not) to its fullest. Particularly, as Tool so spectacularly put it, reaching for “whatever will bewilder me.”
J: You, Manson, you are a symbol. You always wear make-up, no-one knows who you are… Christ is a man who became a symbol, you are the opposite. You are a symbol who is in the process of becoming human. When you say ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’, you prove your love for the world. You offer yourself… you are food for the vampire cannibals. That’s what I feel. Talking about you personally: you are a mythology, but back to front. Each new era needs new mythologies…
M: I completely agree. You understood that so much better than anyone… yes.
J: To express ourselves as artists in the world, we can no longer destroy it. It is ourselves that we have to destroy.
The mystery surrounding the ‘big bangs’ that shook the Kincardine area July 31 deepened last week, with University of Western Ontario (UWO) scientists ruling out a meteor shower.
“Something pretty significant exploded south and west of Goderich and Kincardine,” said Dr. Peter Brown, associate professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Western and the Canada Research Chair of meteor science. “It could have exploded out in Lake Huron.”
Seismic sensors recorded two events minutes apart at the time Kincardine-area fire departments and police were swamped with calls that an explosion had occurred in the area, earthquake experts said Friday.
But Earthquake Canada seismologists say it will take more analysis to determine what caused the events shortly after 11 p.m. on July 31 near Goderich.
The first event was recorded by seismic sensors at 11:01.22 p.m. and had a magnitude of 1.4 at a depth of one kilometre.
The estimated location is in Lake Huron in Canadian waters west of Point Clark, but not far from the Canada-U.S. border.
If it was an earthquake, it is unlikely it would have been felt by anyone, seismologists said.
But there was a second event captured by the seismic recorders at 11:07 p.m., said Earthquake Canada seismologist Catherine Woodgold.
Reviving the controversy that followed the novelist Yukio Mishima throughout his life, a Tokyo court has banned further publication of a memoir by a writer who says he had a homosexual relationship with him. The court ruled on Monday that the use of Mishima’s letters represented copyright infringement.
In its decision, which could have far-reaching consequences for Japanese publishing, the court held that Mishima’s letters to Jiro Fukushima were protected under the country’s copyright laws and could not be used without permission of Mishima’s estate. Mr. Fukushima and his publisher, Bungei Shunju Ltd., one of Japan’s largest producers of books and magazines, were ordered to pay $47,000 in damages to the plaintiffs, Mishima’s son and daughter.
Mishima, perhaps Japan’s most widely known modern writer, committed ritual suicide by sword, or seppuku, at age 45 in 1970. His death was an act of protest after failing to persuade the country’s Self Defense Force to stage a coup d’etat and renounce the American-imposed postwar constitution that places a perpetual ban on aggressive military action by Japan.
“Read Montague is getting frustrated. He’s trying to show me his newest brain scanner, a gleaming white fMRI machine that looks like a gargantuan tanning bed. The door, however, can be unlocked only by a fingerprint scan, which isn’t recognizing Montague’s fingers. Again and again, he inserts his palm under the infrared light, only to get the same beep of rejection. Montague is clearly growing frustrated — “ I can’t get into my own scanning room!” he yells, at no one in particular — but he also appreciates the irony. A pioneer of brain imaging, he oversees one of the premier fMRI setups in the world, and yet he can’t even scan his own hand. “I can image the mind,” he says. “But apparently my thumb is beyond the limits of science.” Montague is director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in downtown Houston.
[..] Montague, who is uncommonly handsome, with a strong jaw and a Hollywood grin, first got interested in the brain while working in the neuroscience lab of Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman as a post-doc. “I was never your standard neuroscientist,” he says. “I spent a lot of time thinking about how the brain should work, if I had designed it.” For Montague the cortex was a perfect system to model, since its incomprehensible complexity meant that it depended on some deep, underlying order. “You can’t have all these cells interacting with each other unless there’s some logic to the interaction,” he says. “It just looked like noise, though — no one could crack the code.” That’s what Montague wanted to do.
[..] Montague realized that if he was going to solve the ciphers of the mind, he would need a cryptographic key, a “cheat sheet” that showed him a small part of the overall solution. Only then would he be able to connect the chemistry to the electricity, or understand how the signals of neurons represented the world, or how some spasm of cells caused human nature. “There are so many different ways to describe what the brain does,” Montague says. “You can talk about what a particular cell is doing, or look at brain regions with fMRI, or observe behavior. But how do these things connect? Because you know they are connected; you just don’t know how.”
That’s when Montague discovered the powers of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain. His research on the singular chemical has drawn tantalizing connections between the peculiar habits of our neurons and the peculiar habits of real people, so that the various levels of psychological description — the macro and the micro, the behavioral and the cellular — no longer seem so distinct. What began as an investigation into a single neurotransmitter has morphed into an exploration of the social brain: Montague has pioneered research that allows him to link the obscure details of the cortex to all sorts of important phenomena, from stock market bubbles to cigarette addiction to the development of trust. “We are profoundly social animals,” he says. “You can’t really understand the brain until you understand how these social behaviors happen, or what happens when they go haywire.”
“Of all the places that should have comic books, I think libraries should be at the top of the list. Sadly some still haven’t caught on and I’m left not getting to read the stuff I want. So much for finding everything I want at my local library.
As a general rule of economics and pop culture, when comics become more popular the access to comics becomes easier. There are online comic stores, regular comics stores, and now digital comics available in electronic formats. As much as I enjoy this new access to comics, I’m not interested in buying everything I want to read. If there was a place to borrow books for free I’d use it for comics. Oh wait, there is, it’s a library. The only problem is that the libraries I visit only seem to stock comics sparingly.
I’m a working stiff. I’m not rolling in money or time. If I was I would buy the books I want to read and sell the ones I don’t enjoy. That involves money to buy all the books and time to setup online auctions, travel to the post office, confirming the buyer, etc; like I said, time and money are two things that I do not have in excess – even though I make an effort once a week to share my thoughts in this article once a week. Anyway, my local library should be able to help me in this situation. They should be able to provide access to comics and graphic novels for me to try. But they don’t. I’ve even tried libraries out of my neighborhood and out of state.”
Adolf Hitler’s notorious Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a manifesto posing as autobiography, has long been banned from German bookshelves “out of a responsibility and respect for the victims of the Holocaust.” But 83 years after it was first published, some Germans argue it should be made available again in order to drain it of whatever power it might still have.
A debate over the book is slowly growing in Germany, in part because Mein Kampf’s copyright, held by the state of Bavaria, will expire in 2015. Then the book will enter the public domain, and anyone will be able to reprint the text. Academics and officials who fear that a flood of new editions may be abused by far-right extremists are now demanding that a carefully researched and critical edition of the 800-page tome be prepared as a way to demystify it.
Hot on the heels of a different announcement about Werner Herzog’s collaboration with Nic Cage comes words of an even stranger paring. The Hollywood Reporter reports that a film co-written by Herzog and his longtime assistant director Herbert Golder will be produced by David Lynch and his Absurda production company.
My Son, My Son is based on the true story of a man who, based upon a play by Sophocles, kills his mother with a sword. Lynchian enough already, the film will tell the story in a flashback structure. Also following Lynch’s style, it will be shot in DV rather than film. My Son was actually delayed in order for Herzog to work with Cage while his schedule allows. He’ll also be tight on shooting afterwards, since he’s signed on to shoot The Piano Tuner this fall. With his documentary Encounters at the End of the World out this summer, even for Herzog, 2008 is one prolific year.
As odd a collaboration as Herzog and Lynch may be (and trust us, it’s odd), even more unlikely comes the announcement that Lynch and Absurda will be working on a film with Alejandro Jodorowsky. Best known for his series of surreal, mind-bending Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky hasn’t made a film since 1990. Jodorowsky certainly shares a lot more common ground with Lynch, but hearing of any new project by the Chilean 79-year-old is a bit incredible.
Jodorowsky’s film will be the metaphysical gangster movie King Shot. Already guaranteed to be NC-17 (no surprise given his earlier works), the film features Marilyn Manson as a 300-year old pope and will star Nick Nolte.
Meanwhile, Lynch is spending any time he’s not producing on his own project according to Hollywood Today. A “Lynch-esque documentary,” (as if he could direct any other kind), it’s a road movie where he speaks with regular folks on the meaning of life and discusses the ’60s with Donovan and John Hagelin. Looks like these days Lynch may be just as busy as Herzog.
Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just the deaths of frogs and salamanders, University of California, Berkeley scientists said Tuesday.
Researchers said substantial die-offs of amphibians and other plant and animal species add up to a new mass extinction facing the planet, the scientists said in an online article this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.”
New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species, scientists said.
Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events. There have been only five in our planet’s history, until now, scientists said.
“When Tallan “T-Man” Latz was 5, he saw Joe Satriani playing guitar on TV. “I turned around to my dad and said, ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’” Three years and countless hours of practicing later, 8-year-old Tallan is a blues guitar prodigy. He’s played in bars and clubs, including the House of Blues in Chicago, and even jammed with Les Paul and Jackson Browne. He has a summer of festivals scheduled and has drawn interest from venues worldwide.
And what, you might ask, would a kid not even in the third grade have the blues about? The state of Wisconsin for one, and some possibly jealous older musicians for another. An anonymous e-mail sent to state officials complained that Tallan was too young to perform in taverns and nightclubs because of state child labor laws. His booking agent even got an anonymous letter threatening her with death if she keeps booking him.”
“Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below is a transcript of our conversation.
M: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done?
HP: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had said that he didn’t think Lennon’s cranial sutures had healed anyway, because he was such a creative person. At the time, I just thought “Wow! That’s a bit freaky” and didn’t think much more about it. Then later on, I did a lot of acid, which kind of mashed my head up a bit. I remember getting these pressure or tension headaches, and thinking that John Lennon said he was going to do it to relieve the pressure. By the mid-nineties, I started to realize that it wasn’t dangerous, and decided that I was going to it if I could find somebody to give me a hand. But that proved to be quite difficult, so then I let it drop for a while. One of my initial reasons for wanting to have it done was for more mental energy and clarity. I had been working in Cheltenham, and got made redundant. I bought a computer, got online, and eventually got in touch with Pete Halvorson in the States, who had trepanned himself in the early 1970s. I was going over for a wedding anyway, so we arranged to meet so he could help me with it.”
“Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says. Published in today’s online edition of Nature Medicine, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in New York City also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger.
The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ’s cells. As people age their cells become less efficient at getting rid of damaged protein resulting in a build-up of toxic material that is especially pronounced in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers say the findings suggest that therapies for boosting protein clearance might help stave off some of the declines in function that accompanies old age.”
“The Pyramid Texts Online website has had a major update with the addition of the Library. Sit down and relax with an old classic, flick through the pages on-screen thanks to the Internet Archive’s Flip Book. Due to the antique age of most of these books it is best to use something more current for study purposes but these old books are an enjoyable look back at the past thoughts of earlier writers.
There are also links to other online books, articles and also a paprii section which includes Papyrii.info, a search engine of papyrological resources called the Papyrological Navigator. Other pages were also updated and the Tools page now has some new additions and Mark Vyges’ Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary has just been updated this week.”
FLicKeR iS a new Dream MachHine documentary directed by Nik Sheehan, who is apparently much beloved of rAndOM CapITaL LetTerS. We begin with Sheehan carting a new and beautifully engineered Dream Machine around and testing it out on rock stars, DJs, and old cronies of Gysin, who died in 1986. For the most part, hearing their reactions to the device is no more interesting than hearing about people’s pot trips, but because Sheehan picked some perceptive—if not always particularly germane—trippers, the talking heads give good talk. Sitting in a comfortable New York loft with his eyes closed (which is the best way to let the Dream Machine’s pulsing frequency bring on the alpha waves and audio-visual stimuli that can trigger trance), Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo, not only describes beautiful clouds of color but points out the device’s connection to early cinematic devices.
Unfortunately, this is the only time this vital vein of flicker tech is even mentioned in the film. The brain science behind the effect gets a bit more time, but in general this is a very average documentary that blows more chances for excellence and depth than it exploits. The written voice-over material is terribly banal, with potted histories of the Beats and Hassan i Sabbah (illustrated with cheesy CG that brings back 1992 rave graphics), and a legion of unfortunate phrases. For example, Gysin is described as a “serious dabbler in the occult” (a serious dabbler?) and his machine as a “portal into the space-time continuum.” I mean, aren’t we already stuck inside the space-time continuum? Didn’t these guys want to find a way out?
A collaboration of various medical researchers in the academic field has led to proof that pacemakers can be remotely hacked with simple and accessible equipment. [Kevin Fu], an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, led the team. [Kevin] first tried to get documentation from the manufacturers, believing they would support the effort, but they were not interested in helping. They were forced to get access to an old pacemaker and reverse engineer it. They found that the communication protocol used to remotely program the device was unencrypted. They then used a GNU radio system to find access to some of the machine’s reprogrammable functions, including accessing patient data and even turning it off.
It “doesn’t look like something you’d want dripping into your veins,” wrote Wil McCarthy in the August 2002 issue of Wired. At the time, he had no way of knowing just how right he was about Hemopure, the artificial blood that seemed so promising. It was universally compatible and had a three-year shelf life (unrefrigerated). But a recent meta-analysis of trials on several substitutes — including Hemopure — contains some gory results. Turns out, the fake bloods scavenge nitric oxide, causing vasoconstriction; patients who get them are 2.7 times more likely to have a heart attack and 30 percent more likely to die. A Journal of the American Medical Association editorial has called for a halt to trials.
Websites are targeting your children with so-called digital drugs. These are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects.
All your child needs is a music player and headphones. […]
There are different slang terms for digital drugs. They’re often called “idozers” or “idosers.” All rely on the concept of binaural beats. […]
Other sites offer therapeutic binaural beats. They help you relax or meditate. Some allegedly help you overcome addiction or anxiety. Others purport to help you lose weight or eliminate gray hair.
However, most sites are more sinister. They sell audio files (”doses”) that supposedly mimic the effects of alcohol and marijuana.
But it doesn’t end there. You’ll find doses that purportedly mimic the effects of LSD, crack, heroin and other hard drugs. There are also doses of a sexual nature. I even found ones that supposedly simulate heaven and hell.
