In 1995, government inspectors spent months on Bodmin moor in Cornwall looking for evidence of a ‘beast’ roaming wild there. They found nothing. Yet every year there are 2,000 similarly spurious big-cat sightings in Britain. What’s going on? (The Guardian).

Related articles

• Beast proves big cat did roam Britain – but it’s the stuff of legend now
• The Never-Spotted Leopard

English: W Harbottle & Son, Joiner & Undertaker. Complete with Chapel of Rest but soon to be converted into apartments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the director of Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit that helps people avoid funeral fraud, I know all about mortuary mythology. (That’s what I call the collective “wisdom” about death, dying, funerals, and dead people.) Most Americans get their information about how to bury the dead from the people we pay to do it for us—not exactly the most disinterested source.

Funeral directors aren’t all crooks and making your living burying the dead is a perfectly respectable career. But they are in business to pay their bills. Even super-savvy shoppers let their brains go on vacation when they buy one of the most emotionally fraught and potential costly services. You don’t walk into the car dealer with a blank check and you shouldn’t do it at the undertaker’s.

Here’s how to get the send-off that fits your tastes and your budget. (Lifehacker)

Related articles

• Day of the dead: Regulations bury grieving families
• Funeral homes slammed for charging £580 for £59 cardboard coffins
• Humanist Funerals Thrive In Post-Catholic Ireland
• The Beginners Guide To Funerals (Finding The Starting Point)

 

North Carolina 2-year-old puts dad’s unattended gun in his mouth and fires: A 2-year-old boy in North Carolina is expected to survive after shooting himself with his father’s gun over the weekend.

Randolph County deputies said that the toddler found the handgun in his parents’ room at their home just outside Asheboro around 2 p.m. on Saturday. The boy put the gun in his mouth and fired it.

According to WGHP, the boy was listed in critical condition Brenner Children’s Hospital in Winston-Salem on Sunday, but was expected to live.

“The bullet missed all the vital arteries there in the neck in the head and also missed the spinal cords, so I said it’s a miracle the child is still with us,” Randolph County Sheriff’s Office Captain Derrick Hill explained to WGHP. (The Raw Story)

Fringe right-wing radio host Pete Santilli made disturbing comments about Hillary Clinton last week, calling for sexual violence against the former secretary of state because of her alleged involvement in a bizarre conspiracy theory.

“Miss Hillary Clinton needs to be convicted, she needs to be tried, convicted and shot in the vagina,” he said. “I wanna pull the trigger. That ‘C U Next Tuesday’ has killed human beings that are in our ranks of our service.”

Santilli alleged Clinton was involved in drug trafficking in Arkansas and the killing of U.S. troops overseas.  (The Raw Story)

“As suicide rates climb steeply in the US a growing number of psychiatrists are arguing that suicidal behaviour should be considered as a disease in its own right, rather than as a behaviour resulting from a mood disorder.

They base their argument on mounting evidence showing that the brains of people who have committed suicide have striking similarities, quite distinct from what is seen in the brains of people who have similar mood disorders but who died of natural causes.

Suicide also tends to be more common in some families, suggesting there may be genetic and other biological factors in play. What’s more, most people with mood disorders never attempt to kill themselves, and about 10 per cent of suicides have no history of mental disease.

The idea of classifying suicidal tendencies as a disease is being taken seriously. The team behind the fifth edition of the Diagnostic Standards Manual (DSM-5) – the newest version of psychiatry’s “bible”, released at the American Psychiatric Association’s meeting in San Francisco this week – considered a proposal to have “suicide behaviour disorder” listed as a distinct diagnosis. It was ultimately put on probation: put into a list of topics deemed to require further research for possible inclusion in future DSM revisions.” (New Scientist).

New Scientist has by far the best coverage of the core issues around diagnostic revision in psychiatry, as an aside. This issue is yet another challenge to diagnostic categorization. I have long felt that suicidal behavior cuts across labels, that suicidal patients with different diagnoses have more similarities than differences, and there is a dissociation between treatment of the underlying disorder and treatment fo the suicidal behavior. Suicide may have a distinct biocmistry and neurophysiology, or it may be an epiphenomenon of another phenomenon which cuts across diagnoses, namely impulsivity and dyscontrol.

Related articles

• Psychiatrists are being asked to be judges in assessing suicide risk, abortion hearings told (irishtimes.com)
• Changes to psychiatric manual ignite debate over grief, mental illness and faith (stltoday.com)
• Suicide and the New DSM (drvitelli.typepad.com)
• Studying Repeat Suicide-Related Behavior In Youth (medicalnewstoday.com)

A debate over what to do in the face of rising seas and sinking land (National Geographic).

With the promise of more and more extreme weather, officials rush to make infrastructure improvements. But they may be ignoring the greatest factor in survivability, a robust social infrastructure among the affected. What can we do, in the face of the ongoing breakdown of community in modern life? (New Scientist)

Related articles

• Survival of the shyest: Timidity’s surprising benefits
• Urban Survival:survive Any Disaster Without Leaving Home
• BUGGING OUT vs HUNKERING DOWN

‘With the new manual on the eve of its official debut, many experts are already looking beyond it. Some envision a future in which psychiatric diagnoses are based on the underlying biological causes instead of a description of a patient’s symptoms. Others caution that such a single-minded focus on biology ignores important social factors that contribute to mental illness. If there’s any area of agreement it’s this: There has to be a better way.

The DSM is used by doctors to diagnose patients, by insurance companies to decide what treatments to pay for, and by pharmaceutical companies and government funding agencies to set research priorities. The new edition, DSM-5, defines hundreds of mental disorders.

The fundamental problem, according to many of DSM’s critics, is that these definitions don’t carve nature at its joints.

“An obvious, easy example is schizophrenia,” said Peter Kinderman, a clinical psychologist at the University of Liverpool. “If you’re a 52-year-old man who hears voices, you’ll receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia. If you’re a 27-year-old woman with delusional beliefs, you’ll also receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia,” Kinderman said. “Two people can receive the same diagnosis and not have a single thing in common. That’s ludicrous scientifically.”

In most areas of medicine, diagnoses are based on the cause of illness. Heartburn and heart attacks both cause chest pain, but they’re different diagnoses because they have different underlying causes.

‘Two people can receive the same diagnosis and not have a single thing in common. That’s ludicrous scientifically.’

In psychiatry, however, the underlying causes are poorly understood. What doctors now diagnose as schizophrenia may in fact be several disorders with different causes that happen to produce an overlapping set of symptoms. Conversely, two people with the same underlying biology could conceivably end up with two different DSM diagnoses — one with schizophrenia, say, and the other with bipolar disorder…’ (Wired.com)

Although I certainly know how and when to ‘label’ (e.g. to help my patients secure coverage from their insurance companies) I have long been a critic of the DSM, not merely as the 5th edition is released. Diagnostic nihilism is the only way to treat individual patients, given the modern state of psychiatry.

As both a psychiatrist and a confirmed eccentric, this is dear to my heart:

“With an assist from an overly ambitious psychiatry, all human difference is being transmuted into chemical imbalance meant to be treated with a handy pill. Turning difference into illness was among the great strokes of marketing genius accomplished in our time.

All the great characters in myths, novels, and plays have endured the test of time precisely because they drift so colorfully away from the mean. Do we really want to put Oedipus on the couch, give Hamlet a quick course of behavior therapy, start Lear on antipsychotics?

I think not. Human diversity has its purposes or it would not have survived the evolutionary rat race. Our ancestors made it because the tribe combined a wide variety of talents and inclinations. There were leaders high on their own narcissism and followers content enough to be dependent on them; people who were paranoid enough to sniff out hidden threats, compulsive enough to get the job done, and exhibitionistic enough to attract mates. Perhaps the healthiest individuals were those who best balanced all these traits somewhere near the golden mean, but the best bet for the group was to have outliers always ready to step up to the plate as the particular occasion demanded.

I like eccentricity and eccentrics. The word eccentric comes from Greek geometry meaning “out of center.” It entered English as an astronomical description of the rotational paths of the heavenly bodies. Now it is used to describe people who are different — mostly with pejorative connotations, not often enough with admiration for their particular genius.

Nature abhors homogeneity and simply adores eccentric diversity. We should celebrate the fact that most humans are at least somewhat eccentric and accept ourselves as we are, warts and all. Human difference was never meant to be reducible to an exhaustive list of diagnoses drawn carelessly from a psychiatric manual.” (Wired.com)

This is by Allen Frances MD, professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Duke University School of Medicine. The Chairman of the DSM-IV Task Force and part of the leadership group for previous editions, Frances’ book Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life was released this week.

Related articles

• Medicine’s big new battleground: does mental illness really exist? (syndicatednewsservices.com)
• Books blast new version of psychiatry’s bible, the DSM (usatoday.com)
• Marketing Crazy – manual doctors use to diagnose mental illness has critics fearing a bonanza of over-medication (cchrint.org)
• Is Grief a Mental Illness? (aarp.org)

“

Finding vaccines to combat drugs of abuse is an ongoing and challenging quest. The goal is to find compounds that produce antibodies that bind to drugs in the bloodstream, stopping them from entering the brain, and thus eliminating their effects. A heroin vaccine is even more difficult to develop because the drug quickly metabolizes into other active compounds. However, researchers from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., have tested a new approach that that takes heroin metabolism into account.” (Psychiatric News)

An interview with Melissa Mohr, author of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing. The power of swearing—and what our worst curses say about us. (The Boston Globe).

“Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking.” (New Republic).

Thai Piledriving. (YouTube)

“Some of the biggest names in marketing, including Ford Motor, General Motors, Hyundai Motor, Reebok and PepsiCo, have been forced recently to apologize to consumers who mounted loud public outcries against ads that hinged on subjects like race, rape and suicide.” (NYTimes)

 Patients with mental disorders deserve better: “The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.”

As a result of their misgivings, the NIMH announced that it would abandon DSM-based diagnostic categories as a basis for its research projects. (NIMH)

I can say with some degree of varying certainty that “some degree of varying certainty” can certainly mean yes, no, or maybe.

…Eliot Gelwan
(Brookline/Concord MA USA)

For you: This is all in your head.
The bluish glow, the call across the years,
all of this, it’s phase II, you cannot deny it.
So, slickly, coyly, will we offer,
close to home,
A little food, which we like
A little confusion, which we like in her.
Because all the pulse points are exposed,
both for weakness and strength,
soft and slight….

I think this really serves no purpose
Unless it will govern history, as well as health.
And let diseases follow as they will.
Then, see that what is needed now is a healer
But only in need,
personal ills at a constant level.

He is at work, old, I think.
Still, it has to come to light;
no, it was visible already,
Creating, at base, some control.
The undulation of goals, good and bad, in your view.

No cause,
not pierced,
now discharged fully.
Oh yes, it will be pleasant, so we wish to pass it on to you
and, in raising the issue, absolve you.
Today used in full, this child,
To see the most likely and complete explanations.

In this year, used in full, we will, we will, we will…
Will be sent, will be good, and the line will be incised
Here, a flood, without closed eyes.
A chord, at least for you.
A locality, at least for us.
We will live here, and he and she,
and not hand in the years.
This is too much; this is too little,
For you, used in full.

What do you think this is about? A clue?

The concept of a shadow biosphere was first outlined by Cleland and her Colorado colleague Shelley Copley in a paper in 2006 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, and is now supported by many other scientists, including astrobiologists Chris McKay, who is based at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre, California, and Paul Davies.These researchers believe life may exist in more than one form on Earth: standard life – like ours – and “weird life”, as they term the conjectured inhabitants of the shadow biosphere. “All the micro-organisms we have detected on Earth to date have had a biology like our own: proteins made up of a maximum of 20 amino acids and a DNA genetic code made out of only four chemical bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine,” says Cleland. “Yet there are up to 100 amino acids in nature and at least a dozen bases. These could easily have combined in the remote past to create lifeforms with a very different biochemistry to our own. More to the point, some may still exist in corners of the planet.”Science’s failure to date to spot this weird life may seem puzzling. The natural history of our planet has been scrupulously studied and analysed by scientists, so how could a whole new type of life, albeit a microbial one, have been missed? Cleland has an answer. The methods we use to detect micro-organisms today are based entirely on our own biochemistry and are therefore incapable of spotting shadow microbes, she argues. A sample of weird microbial life would simply not trigger responses to biochemists’ probes and would end up being thrown out with the rubbish. (The Raw Story).

Iain Banks diagnosed with gall bladder cancer: ‘Scottish author unlikely to live longer than a year and latest novel The Quarry set to be his last, he revealed on his website…

His website soon broke under pressure from wellwishers who wanted to read the news and leave tributes.

Banks has delighted fans with his prolific output under two names, and outraged literary puritans with his blithe assertion that he aimed to devote no more than three months a year to writing, because there were so many more interesting things to do – like driving fast cars and playing with fancy technology.

So it must have seemed a very black joke indeed when he discovered a back problem he had ascribed “to the fact I’d started writing at the beginning of [January] and so was crouched over a keyboard all day” was something much more serious.

“When it hadn’t gone away by mid-February, I went to my GP, who spotted that I had jaundice. Blood tests, an ultrasound scan and then a CT scan revealed the full extent of the grisly truth by the start of March,” he wrote.

“I have cancer. It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours either in the short or long term.”

He said he and his new wife intend “to spend however much quality time I have left seeing friends and relations and visiting places that have meant a lot to us”.

His publishers, meanwhile, are doing all they can to bring forward the publication date of his new novel, The Quarry, “by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves”. ‘ (The Guardian).

“In the University of Oxford, Gabriel Villar has created a 3-D printer with a difference. While most such printers create three-dimensional objects by laying down metals or plastics in thin layers, this one prints in watery droplets. And rather than making dolls or artworks or replica dinosaur skulls, it fashions the droplets into something a bit like living tissue.” (Not Exactly Rocket Science).

‘Humans’ closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, have the ability to “think about thinking” — what is called “metacognition,” according to new research by scientists at Georgia State University and the University at Buffalo.

Michael J. Beran and Bonnie M. Perdue of the Georgia State Language Research Center (LRC) and J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo conducted the research, published in the journal Psychological Science of the Association for Psychological Science.

“The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution,” the research team noted.

Metacognition is the ability to recognize one’s own cognitive states. For example, a game show contestant must make the decision to “phone a friend” or risk it all, dependent on how confident he or she is in knowing the answer.’ (Science Daily).

The report seems to indicate that the chimps can distinguish what they do and do not know, as evidenced by the use of that recognition as the basis for action. I agree that this would fit the bill for being ‘metacognition’ if it were true, but I am not sure the study demonstrates that.

One contact of dead Shanghai H7N9 patient shows flu symptoms – “SHANGHAI, April 5 (Xinhua) — A person who had close contact with a dead H7N9 bird flu patient in Shanghai has been under treatment in quarantine after developing symptoms of fever, running nose and throat itching, local authorities said late Thursday.

So far, China has confirmed 14 H7N9 cases — six in Shanghai, four in Jiangsu, three in Zhejiang and one in Anhui, in the first known human infections of the lesser-known strain. Of all, four died in Shanghai and one died in Zhejiang.” (Xinhua)

“It’s not quite redemption, but one of most loathed invasive species in the world—the European green crab Carcinus maenas—has had a surprisingly positive effect on an ecosystem. On Cape Cod, Massachusetts, researchers have found that the crab is reversing a decades-long trend of damage that another species has inflicted on salt marshes. It might be the first nice thing that the green crab has done for anyone.” (ScienceNOW).

Related:

• slavin: Photographer Dillon Marsh’s “Invasive Species” series…. (new-aesthetic.tumblr.com)
• Invasive species hitchhiking to west coast on tsunami debris (timescolonist.com)
• Invasive species? This sushi chef rolls with it (grist.org)
• A Blue View: The Truth About Invasive Species (nationalaquarium.wordpress.com)
• Tasty Invasives (nature.org)

“This should totally be a thing everywhere!” (Mind Boggling Stories – Quora).

‘We are in the midst of a “narcissism epidemic,” concluded psychologists Jean M. Twnege and W. Keith Campbell in their 2009 book. One study they describe showed that among a group of 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as quickly as obesity from the 1980s to the present…

Evidence for the rise in narcissism continues to come up in research and news. A study
by psychologist Dr. Nathan DeWall and his team
found “a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and
hostility in popular music” since the 1980s. Shawn Bergman, an assistant
professor of
organizational psychology at Appalachian State University in Boone,
North Carolina notes that “narcissism levels among millennials are higher than
previous generations.”

Researchers at Western Illinois University measured
two socially disruptive aspects of
narcissistic personalities — grandiose exhibitionism and
entitlement/exploitativeness. Those who had high scores on grandiose
exhibitionism tended to
amass more friends on Facebook. Buffardi and Campbell found a high
correlation between Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scores and Facebook
activity. Researchers were able to identify those with high NPI scores by studying their Facebook pages.

Elias Aboujaoude, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, notes
that our ability tailor the Internet experience
to our every need is making us more narcissistic. He observes, “This
shift from e- to i- in prefixing Internet URLs and naming electronic
gadgets and apps parallels the rise of the self-absorbed online
Narcissus.” He goes on to state that, “As we get accustomed to having
even our most minor needs …
accommodated to this degree, we are growing more needy and more
entitled. In other words, more narcissistic.” ‘ (The Atlantic)

“Whimsy is not a quality we usually associate with computer programs. We tend to think of software in terms of the function it fulfills. For example, a spreadsheet helps us do our work. A game of Tetris provides a means of procrastination. Social media reconnects us with our high school nemeses. But what about computer code that serves no inherent purpose in itself?

This is a Tumblr blog of haikus found within The New York Times. Most of us first encountered haikus in a grade school, when we were taught that they are three-line poems with five syllables on the first line, seven on the second and five on the third. According to the Haiku Society of America, that is not an ironclad rule. A proper haiku should also contain a word that indicates the season, or “kigo,” as well as a juxtaposition of verbal imagery, known as “kireji.” That’s a lot harder to teach an algorithm, though, so we just count syllables like most amateur haiku aficionados do.” (Times Haiku).

“When it was first measured in 2000, ‘HD 140283′ also known as the ‘Methuseleh Star’ appeared to be approximately 2 billion years older than the universe. Obviously something was amiss and SciShow explains how the mystery was eventually solved by scientists in this terrific video.” (How-to Geek).

“…[H]owever much the rational and sane majority airily dismiss tales of fire-breathing dragons, strange creatures from outer space or beasts that inhabit the depths, there is still buried in most of us that reflex that can’t help, on a dark night, walking along a lonely country lane, wondering, “What if there’s something out there?” And when we do, the collective cultural baggage of these tales of ghosts, ghouls and griffins is usually sufficient to make us put our hands over our eyes to block out what may just be lurking out there. But, then, we still peep….” (Telegraph).

“Are you up for going on that unique trip that almost no one has done before you? The problem might just be finding the right destination. The least visited country in the world may not be the one you would think.I am currently conducting research through visits to all 198 countries of the world. The reason? To figure out where I eventually want to go on proper holiday. I have been to 190 countries so far and I often wondered which countries are the very least visited ones. Remoteness, visa regulations, governments, available travel information and how many visitors I see on my travels give me a certain idea, but what do the statistics say? If they even exist. And where can I find such official statistics?” (Migrating Mania).

I have been to just one of the countries on this list. How about you?

“Here’s Death and Taxes’s collection of 18 obsolete words that would be handy (or at least funny) to use today, compiled by Carmel Lobello from a book called The Word Museum and a blog called Obsolete Word of the Day. Some of my favorites…” (Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing).

“Can’t wait until the world ends and EVERYTHING looks like this.”  (BuzzFeed).

Related articles

• Abandoned Places 3
• Beauty Among The Ruins: See Some of the World’s Most Beautiful Abandoned Places
• 11 Walls That Are Definitely Watching You
• Photos of the World’s Most Beautiful Abandoned Places
• 7 Monumental Abandoned Wonders of Military Architecture

So this guy goes to pick up his babysitting girlfriend and starts chatting with the 9-year old boy she is watching. He throws him some difficult questions to mess with him. Watch what ensues (video). (Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

“What do we do with inconvenient evidence? Imagine studying a seemingly absurd practice that is used to an alarming extent by those who believe in it despite the lack of evidence – and finding that the intervention improves outcomes. And imagine that the people conducting that trial are famous scientists with impeccable credentials who have extensive experience with this type of investigation. Imagine that the practice is so out of the mainstream that the investigators cannot even posit how the treatment could reduce patient risk?

We live in a world of evidence-based medicine, where we are urged to base our medical recommendations and decisions on clinical studies. We base our guidelines on the medical literature and evaluate our practices by how well we adhere to the evidence. But what should we do with inconvenient evidence?” (Forbes).

To make up for pesky competition from the Internet, the owner of an Australian retail store is charging patrons $5 for “just looking”, in order to offset losses from shoppers who browse and then buy online. “If you’re going to be asking bucketloads of questions, you’ve got to pay for the information,” said Celiac Supplies owner, Georgina, to the Brisbane Times, who asked that her last name not be published, after her store’s policy inadvertently went viral and led to Internet infamy.

On her window, she posted the following notice:

According to the Times, 4 people have coughed up the $5, meaning her policy has earned a solid $20, which I’m sure is more than enough money to make up for harassing most of the customers who walk through her door.

(TechCrunch).

 

A Buyer’s Guide for Psychopaths: “Are you sick of product reviews that don’t cover the issues that matter to you? Most product review sites are all “reliability this” and “functionality that,” when all you really want to know is “Will this product assist me in fulfilling an elaborate and lifelong revenge mission?” Well, finally, I’m here to supply you with the answers you need. Today, we’re going to profile five products for the discerning modern psychopath. Our review will take place in two parts: First, an introduction and quick rundown of each product, then a practical real-life field test where I will attempt to use each one to help unleash my cunning vengeance on an unsuspecting world.” (Cracked)

(thedailybeast: Photo of the Day)

“…[I]n some ways, gay parents may bring talents to the table that straight parents don’t.

Gay parents “tend to be more motivated, more committed than heterosexual parents on average, because they chose to be parents,” said Abbie Goldberg, a psychologist at Clark University in Massachusetts who researches gay and lesbian parenting. Gays and lesbians rarely become parents by accident, compared with an almost 50 percent accidental pregnancy rate among heterosexuals, Goldberg said. “That translates to greater commitment on average and more involvement.”

And while research indicates that kids of gay parents show few differences in achievement, mental health, social functioning and other measures, these kids may have the advantage of open-mindedness, tolerance and role models for equitable relationships, according to some research. Not only that, but gays and lesbians are likely to provide homes for difficult-to-place children in the foster system, studies show. (Of course, this isn’t to say that heterosexual parents can’t bring these same qualities to the parenting table.)…” (LiveScience, via @stevesilberman)

“According to people who work with an industry working group that the Federal Aviation Administration set up last year to study the use of portable electronics on planes, the agency hopes to announce by the end of this year that it will relax the rules for reading devices during takeoff and landing. The change would not include cellphones.One member of the group and an official of the F.A.A., both of whom asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly about internal discussions, said the agency was under tremendous pressure to let people use reading devices on planes, or to provide solid scientific evidence why they cannot.” (NYTimes).

 

The Economist explains:  “The election of Pope Francis on March 13th was surprising for several reasons. He is the first pope from South America, making him the first non-European since the 8th century. He is also the only pope to take the name Francis—evoking the humility of St Francis of Assisi, a 12th century Italian monk. Most surprising of all, he is the only member of the Society of Jesus, a religious order dating from the 16th century, to become a pope. But just who are the Jesuits, exactly?” (The Economist).

“New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Primatologist Frans de Waal on memory-champ chimps, tool-using elephants and rats capable of empathy.” (WSJ.com).

A water droplet experiment on the International Space Station in zero gravity. (AmericaBlog).

“Facebook has so many features that at least one of them has to be useful, right? Here’s the page on Facebook that just shows you links shared by the people you follow. No tweets, no photos, no jingoistic rants from distant cousins. Just the links.” (kottke)

According to recently declassified tapes of President Johnson’s phone conversations, Richard Nixon sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks for fear it would scuttle his reelection. Johnson did nothing about it. (BBC News).

“Algae-like structures inside a Sri Lankan meteorite are clear evidence of panspermia, the idea that life exists throughout the universe, say astrobiologists.” (MIT Technology Review).

“Physics and heavy metal don’t seem to have a lot in common, but Matt Bierbaum and Jesse Silverberg have found a connection. Both are graduate students at Cornell University. They’re also metal heads who enjoy going to concerts and hurling themselves into mosh pits full of like-minded fans.” (NPR [thanks, Rich!])  Article comes with built-in mosh pit simulator.

Related articles:

• Mosh-pit physics could save lives (physicsworld.com)
• What Mosh Pits Can Teach Us About Disaster Planning (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• The Physics of Mosh Pits (dangerousminds.net)
• Mosh Pit Physics (neatorama.com)
• How a Simulated Mosh Pit Could Save Your Life (gizmodo.co.uk)
• The Physics Of Mosh Pits Could Help Save You In A Disaster (newscientist.com)
• Mosh pit physics could aid disaster planning (newscientist.com)
• Scientists Take The Fun Out Of Heavy Metal Mosh Pits (kroq.cbslocal.com)
• Mosh pit madness … it’s a gas (abc.net.au)