Archive for August, 2009
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D
If you only watch one astronomy video this year, make it this one. This is unbelievable eye-candy, and I encourage you to enjoy it!
Mexico Legalizes Drug Possession
Mexico decriminalized small amounts of marijuana, cocaine and heroin on Friday — a move that prosecutors say makes sense even in the midst of the government’s grueling battle against drug traffickers.
Prosecutors said the new law sets clear limits that keep Mexico’s corruption-prone police from shaking down casual users and offers addicts free treatment to keep growing domestic drug use in check.
“This is not legalization, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty,” said Bernardo Espino del Castillo of the attorney general’s office.
The new law sets out maximum “personal use” amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities no longer face criminal prosecution.
Japan’s Disappearing Mediums Meet On The Mountain Of Horror
MOUNT OSORE, Japan — Its name means the Mountain of Horror, which seems an apt description for this sacred Buddhist site inside the crater of a dormant volcano. The weather-beaten temple here is surrounded by a lifeless lake and a wasteland of naked rock reeking of sulfur that conjures images of Buddhist hell.
But during the mountain’s twice annual religious festivals, visitors come by the busload to line up before a row of small tents in a corner of the temple. Within are the “itako” — elderly, often blind women who hold séance-like ceremonies that customers hope will allow them to commune with spirits of the dead.
These spiritual mediums seem out of place in a hyper-modern nation better known for bullet trains and hybrid cars. Found only in peripheral areas like this volcano on the far northern tip of Japan’s main island, and only dimly known to most Japanese, the itako…
‘Muck Monster’ Spotted In Florida
WEST PALM BEACH, FL — There’s something lurking just under the surface of the Lake Worth Lagoon.
Greg Reynolds of LagoonKeepers.org recalls, “Channel marker ten is the first time we saw the unknown creature.” “I hollered out…and said what is that? We followed it, started taking video.”
This mysterious creature was caught on tape by the LagoonKeepers.
Cash For Kidney
For most of the thousands of Americans who need a new kidney, there are only two ways to go: persuade a friend or relative to donate, or get on the transplant waiting list.
Yet some New Yorkers with the right connections and a pile of cash appear to have explored a third option.
“I have met many, many people who have told me in confidence that they have bought a kidney. Prominent New Yorkers. And it happens right here in America,” said Robert Berman, founder and director of the Halachic Organ Donor Society.
Berman leads an organization that encourages Jews to become organ donors the legal way – without payment – but said he is often approached by people who need a kidney badly enough to consider paying for one.
Sometimes they even ask for his help finding a broker – a middleman who will arrange a transplant with a paid donor.
Experts and law…
A Broken Heart Really Does Hurt, Scientists Claim
Researchers have found a genetic link between physical pain and social rejection, which means that breaking up with a partner really can be painful.
Psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles say the human body has a gene which connects physical pain sensitivity with social pain sensitivity.
The findings back the common theory that rejection ‘hurts’ by showing that a gene regulating the body’s most potent painkillers — mu-opioids — is involved in socially painful experiences too.
Their study indicates that a variation in the mu-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1), often associated with physical pain, is related to how much social pain a person feels in response to social rejection.
People with a rare form of the gene are more sensitive to rejection and experience more brain evidence of distress in response to rejection than those with the more common form.
The Coming Brain Revolution!
Brain researcher Zack Lynch discusses “the coming neurosociety” in his book “Neuro Revolution,” predicts amazing miracles from brain technology. For example, Lynch envisions “neurosoftware applications” to retrain the brains of Wall Street traders “to reduce the human tendency to overestimate.”
He also believes today’s cognition-enhancing drugs will lead to drugs (and “neurodevices”) which improve memory in normal humans. And ultimately he sees the possibility of a new “neurospiritual tradition,” and even drugs and neurostimulation devices to improve sexual experiences.
“Now, will this come without protest? No.” In fact, Neurotech companies already generate $140 billion each year, suggesting we’re in “the very early stages of a neuro revolution”….
Dissenters: Arm Yourselves!
America’s health care shouting match is igniting a new debate on toting weapons at protests. When I think of weapons at a rally, I’m often reminded of some news coverage the night demonstrators (full disclosure – myself included) took Lake Shore Drive in 2003 during the protests against the Iraq war. Over 800 demonstrators and some passersby in the wrong place at the wrong time ended up detained or arrested by the Chicago police. Thankfully, I returned home that night unscathed by police brutality. When I flipped on the news to see how local media covered the event, I was treated to Fox’s Walter Jacobson talking with a reporter on the ground. Walter asked the reporter “Can you tell me about the protesters? What are they carrying? Do they have bats or clubs?” The on the street reporter was visually stunned by this question, meekly replying “No Walter, they have…
Tom Ridge: I Was Pressured To Raise Terror Alert To Help Bush Win
In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.
Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
Dave Weigel, writing for the Washington Independent, notes that in the past, Ridge has denied manipulating security information for political reasons. In 2004, for example, he said,…
Dark Energy May Not Actually Exist, Scientists Claim
Richard Alleyne: The concept of dark energy was created by cosmologists to fit Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity into reality after modern space telescopes discovered that the Universe was not behaving as it should.
According to Einstein’s work, the speed at which the Universe is expanding following the Big Bang should be slower than it actually is and this unexplained anomaly threatened to turn the whole theory upside down. In order to reconcile this problem the concept of dark energy was invented.
But now Blake Temple and Joel Smoller, mathematicians at the University of California and the University of Michigan, believe they have come up with a whole new set of calculations that allow for all the sums to add up without the need for this controversial substance.
The research could change the way astronomers view the composition of our Universe.
The Standard Model of Cosmology, which describes the evolution of the Universe,…
Man Escapes Charges for Barbecuing Pet Dog
CNN: A man who roasted his pet dog to enjoy as a meal with his family and friends escaped prosecution after authorities in New Zealand determined the animal was killed humanely.
“We were in a dilemma at seeing something we were fairly upset about — but being in a position of being able to do absolutely nothing about it,” said Garth Halliday, of the Auckland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, on Monday.
The SPCA — which investigates acts of animal cruelty and presses charges — responded to the house in Mangere, south of Auckland.
There, officers found the charred body of a Staffordshire terrier cooking in a barbecue pit. “They had had the dog for a while, but the man told us his wife was getting tired of the dog. He was becoming a pest,” Halliday said.
“They decided to get rid of him. But instead of bringing him to the…
Robots ‘Evolve’ the Ability to Deceive
An experiment shows how “deceptive” behavior can emerge from simple rules.
Kristina Grifantini: Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves. The results are detailed in an upcoming PNAS study.
The team programmed small, wheeled robots with the goal of finding food: each robot received more points the longer it stayed close to “food” (signified by a light colored ring on the floor) and lost points when it was close to “poison” (a dark-colored ring). Each robot could also flash a blue light that other robots could detect with their cameras.
“Over the first few generations, robots quickly evolved to successfully locate the food, while emitting light randomly. This resulted in a high intensity of light near food, which provided social…
New York Psychiatrist Exhorts FDA to Rescind Artificial Sweetener Aspartame Approval
Margaret Hamburg, M.D., Commissioner, F.D.A.
5600 Fishers Lane, Rockville, Maryland 20857
Dear Dr. Hamburg:
I would like to urgently request that the F.D.A. re-visit the approval of aspartame.
This is an issue which I have been involved with for the past 25 years — initially because of the adverse effects experienced by one of my patients. I had been treating a then 54 year old woman with imipramine because of recurrent major depressive episodes. Previous psychoanalytically based therapy had proven ineffective, but she responded dramatically to 150mg of imipramine per day. She had done well for 11 years on this medication, but was then suddenly hospitalized with a grand mal seizure and subsequent manic episode.
One could postulate that she was bipolar and the imipramine had triggered the mania, but she had been on the same medication for a total of 11 years, and for the previous 5 years at the same 150mg per day…
Orbital Skydives to Follow Inflatable Heatshield Success?
NASA has announced a successful live test of a prototype inflatable heat shield for re-entry to a planet’s atmosphere. The blow-up shield could have important implications for future missions to Mars — and also, perhaps, for the nascent field of orbital spacesuit skydiving.
CIA Hired Blackwater To Help Assassinate Terrorists
The CIA in 2004 outsourced portions of a secret program to kidnap or assassinate terrorists to the controversial private security firm Blackwater USA, now called Xe Services, according to news reports.
The New York Times reports that according to current and former government officials, Blackwater’s involvement was a key factor in CIA Director Leon Panetta’s decision to cancel the program and divulge it to Congress during an emergency meeting with Congress in June. Congress had not been informed previously of the program’s existence, allegedly under orders from then-Vice President Dick Cheney, as The Christian Science Monitor reported last month.
Heath Ledger’s Final Film Gets an Acid Trip Trailer
Lauren Davis, io9.com: The first trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus explains little more about the plot behind Heath Ledger’s final bow. But it does offer glimpses of the flying jellyfish, neon motels, and Christopher Plummer-shaped balloons filling Gilliam’s world.
In the film, Christopher Plummer plays Dr. Parnassus, a traveling showman who, a thousand years ago made a deal with the Devil: Parnassus could live forever, but any children he had would become property of the Devil upon their sixteenth birthday. As Parnassus’ daughter Valentina approaches her sixteenth birthday, the Devil returns to collect. Ledger plays Tony, a mysterious outsider who suddenly joins the troupe and arouses Parnassus’ suspicions.
The trailer takes us inside Parnassus’ Imaginarium, a magical mirror that transports people to strange and surreal worlds. We also get a look at Tony’s transformations after Ledger’s untimely death led to Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law being cast…
Time-Traveling for Dummies
A physicist’s review of The Time Traveler’s Wife below. To me, it only worth seeing if it’s better than the worst episode of the modern classic time-traveling TV series of the early ’90s, Quantum Leap:
Dave Goldberg, Slate.com: You might say we’re living in a golden age of time travel. From television shows like Heroes, Lost, and Flash Forward to this summer’s Star Trek movie, punctures in the space/time continuum are turning up all around us. As a physicist — and, perhaps redundantly, a science-fiction geek — I’m particularly sensitive to the pleasures of these mind-bending narratives. I’m also sensitive to their flaws.
Most fictional accounts of time travel are rife with paradoxes, parallel universes, and plot holes that violate strict physical laws: Instead of exploring the limits of our understanding, they make a mockery of them.
That’s why I’m so excited about the film adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which tells the…
Prehistoric Britons Were Cannibals? God Save The Queen!
Maev Kennedy, Guardian: Deliberate cut marks on a 9,000-year-old human bone excavated in a west country cave more than a century ago suggest that prehistoric Devonians may have been cannibals.
Scientists at Oxford University have examined a fragment of human bone from Kents Cavern, near Torquay in Devon, after a curator spotted it in a mass of animal bone in a museum store. They concluded that it was part of the forearm of a human adult, and that the seven cut marks were deliberately made with a stone tool around the time of death.
The marks suggest that either the flesh was stripped or the body chopped into pieces – perhaps for ritual reasons or to make it more convenient to handle. The arm appears to have been fractured around the time of death.
Evidence suggesting cannibalism has been found at a number of prehistoric British sites, including Cheddar Gorge, and bones apparently…
