‘Death by fright is a phenomenon that was first documented by anthropologists in societies that had strong taboos and a belief in hexes. Individuals who had been cursed or broken a taboo would become so distraught that they would drop dead. When physiologist Walter Cannon brought it to the attention of the medical community, he termed it “voodoo death”—a name that has stuck. “It is a fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror,” Cannon wrote. Of course, the real cause of voodoo death (or psychogenic death, the name I’ll stick with) is a bit more scientific than that. To get an expert to explain things, I called Gregory Davis, a forensic pathologist of 22 years and a chief medical examiner in Alabama…’

Source: Motherboard

‘How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random? (See also “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions.”) The answers to these ethical questions are important because they could have a big impact on the way self-driving cars are accepted in society. Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘…The Thing starts. It had been 9 years since The Exorcist scared the living shit out of audiences in New York and sent people fleeing into the street. Really … up the aisle and out the door at full gallop. You would think that people had calmed down a bit since then. No…’

Source: Boing Boing

Two of the tensest, scariest hours of my life, and repeated every time I watch it.

More for Halloween: the Carfax Abbey Horror Films and Movies Database includes best-ever-horror-films lists from Entertainment Wekly, Mr. Showbiz and Hollywood.com. I’ve seen most of these; some of their choices are not that scary, some are just plain silly, and they give extremely short shrift to my real favorites, the classics of the ’30’s and ’40’s — when much eeriness was allusive and not explicit. And here’s what claims to be a compilation of links to the darkest and most gruesome sites on the web. “Hours and hours of fun for morbidity lovers.”

‘In celebration of Halloween, we took a shallow dive into the horror subgenre of evil-child horror movies. Weird-kid cinema stretches back at least to 1956’s The Bad Seed, and has experienced a resurgence recently via movies like The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and Cooties. You could look at this trend as a natural extension of the focus on domesticity seen in horror via the wave of haunted-house movies that 2009’s Paranormal Activity helped usher in. Or maybe we’re just wizening up as a culture and realizing that children are evil and that film is a great way to warn people of this truth.

Happy Halloween. Hope you don’t get killed by trick-or-treaters.’

Source: Gawker

A reprise of my traditional Hallowe’en post of past years:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve.

All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

English: A traditional Irish turnip Jack-o’-lantern from the early 20th century.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North America, given how plentiful they were here. The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (You my be familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.)

Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well. As this article in The Smithsonian reviews, ‘In the United States, Halloween is mostly about candy, but elsewhere in the world celebrations honoring the departed have a spiritual meaning…’

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ’spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. One issue may be that, as NPR observed,

‘“Adults have hijacked Halloween… Two in three adults feel Halloween is a holiday for them and not just kids,” Forbes opined in 2012, citing a public relations survey. True that when the holiday was imported from Celtic nations in the mid-19th century — along with a wave of immigrants fleeing Irelands potato famine — it was essentially a younger persons game. But a little research reveals that adults have long enjoyed Halloween — right alongside young spooks and spirits.’

But is that necessarily a bad thing? A 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul, young or old.

“Maybe at one time Hallowe’en helped exorcise fears of death and ghosts and goblins by making fun of them. Maybe, too, in a time of rigidly prescribed social behavior, Hallowe’en was the occasion for socially condoned mischief — a time for misrule and letting loose. Although such elements still remain, the emphasis has shifted and the importance of the day and its rituals has actually grown.…(D)on’t just abandon a tradition that you yourself loved as a child, that your own children look forward to months in advance, and that helps preserve our sense of fellowship and community with our neighbors in the midst of all this madness.”

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

In any case: trick or treat! …And may your Hallowe’en be soulful.

Related:

• Tricks, Treats and Traditions – Some Useful Tips for Hallowe’en (southeasttourguides.co.uk)
• Weighing In on Hallowe’en (4mothers1blog.wordpress.com)
• Preparing for All Hallow’s Eve (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• OCTOBER FINALE! Hallowe’en! (pm27.wordpress.com)
• Tricksey Treats (jasperlocalfood.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en Night divination game. (jenniferlinton.com)
• Hallowe’en Weekend (sporeflections.wordpress.com)
• All Hallows’ Eve (ramblingratz.wordpress.com)
• About Samhain or ‘All Hallows’ (bethtrissel.wordpress.com)
• Halloween: A Brief History (lakeside.com)
• 13 Facts You Never Knew About Halloween (businessinsider.com)
• A Tarot Circle Game/Encounter for Samhain (jameswells.wordpress.com)
• Hallowe’en; The Do’s And The Don’ts (jackcollier7.com)
• Get ye gone, ye evil spirits (annabelfrage.wordpress.com)
• ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ – Resources for Hallowe’en (davidbradshawenglish.org)
• Hallowe’en! (thepiepatch.wordpress.com)

‘Over the next several nights, skywatchers will be treated to a cool celestial sight as Venus, Mars, and Jupiter hang out together in the morning sky. Here’s what you need to know about the rare conjunction and how to watch.

From now until the first week of November, the brightest planets in the night sky—Venus, Mars, and Jupiter—will appear as a bright trio of dots in the hours just before dawn. And you don’t need a telescope or binoculars to see it. This rare conjunction won’t happen again until January 2021…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘After 21 years, the Annals of Improbable Research — that bastion of uber-nerdy science humor — is switching from a dead tree format to an all-digital PDF format. And it’s holding a special subscription sale to celebrate. From now until October 31, you can get a yearly subscription (six issues) for just $15/year, instead of the usual $25/year….’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Giant squid are among the most mysterious creatures on the planet; the camera-shy behemoths lurk in murky ocean basins across the world. We’ve only seen adult giant squid a handful of times, and now, you’re looking at the first ever wee baby ones.

The three specimens of Architeuthis dux shown here measure only 5.5 to 13 inches (14 to 33 cm) across, each weighing less than a pound. According to Motherboard, they were caught by fisherman off the coast of Japan in 2013…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Today marks a moral victory for the flesh-twinkies of the animal world. Naked mole-rats have been slandered for years as inbred monsters, but at last research shows that that’s not always true. #notallmoleratsNaked mole-rats have long been celebrated for their clear superiority to other rodents. They live three decades longer than their peers, seem to be cancer free for their entire lives, and have a complex “eusocial” society in which multiple generations live together sharing the work it takes to keep the colony running. Really, they’re an example of what we can all achieve if we are willing to give up beauty, clothes, sugar, body hair, and the prospect of ever seeing the sun again. Oh, and also if we give up having sex with people outside our family.

Yep, mole-rat societies were found to be inbred. Eusocial societies, in mammals, seem to require a certain amount of close family bonding. Scientists puzzled about the significance of the degree of inbreeding, especially because naked mole-rats are one of the few matriarchies outside of the insect kingdom. Was there a connection?

It now appears that there is not, for the simple reason that naked mole-rats aren’t actually inbred. The original genetic studies on mole-rats involved samples taken solely from an area south of the Athi river in Kenya. There was no reason at the time to suspect that these populations were in any way anomalous, but a recent study that took a look at the genetics of mole-rat populations north of the river turned up totally different results. The south river rats are inbred because they stem from a small initial founding population. Mole-rats north of the river are no more inbred than any other group of mammals.

This means that we’ve taken an animal that already has a face like a mutilated toe and somehow found a way to slander it…’

Source: Gizmodo

Absurd Creature of the week:  ‘What do you get when you mix a Pink Floyd laser light show and Jell-O? The magical comb jelly, of course. It’s not a true jellyfish, but it is one of the most beautiful creatures in the sea. So how does it put on such a performance?’

Source: WIRED

‘The way you navigate a virtual maze may predict your chances of getting Alzheimer’s. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that people at risk for Alzheimer’s have lower activity in a newly-discovered network of navigational brain cells known as “grid cells.” The finding could lead to new ways to diagnose this debilitating disorder. The discovery of the grid cell network won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology last year.

The neurons that make up the “grid” are arranged in a triangular lattice in the entorhinal cortex—a region of the brain used in memory and navigation. The “grid” activates in different patterns based on how individuals move, keeping track of our location in the coordinate plane. Researchers think the cells help create mental maps and allow us to navigate through space even in the absence of visual cues.

“If you close your eyes and walk ten feet forward and turn right and walk three feet forward, the grid cells are believed to [track your position],” says neuroscientist Joshua Jacobs at Columbia University. Intriguingly, people withthe so-called e4 variant of a gene known as APOE—the largest genetic risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s later in life—are at a higher risk for developing abnormalities in their entorhinal cortex. Because the grid cells are found in the same region, scientists wondered if the reason Alzheimer’s patients are more likely to get lost and have difficulty navigating could be explained by damage to the network…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘The largely unregulated supplement industry sells a variety of weird and sometimes dangerous stuff that it wink-nudge promises will cure what ails you, but even the most accurately labeled, evidence-based supplements can make sick people much, much sicker.

People who eat diets rich in antioxidants — plants, mostly — are at a lower risk of many illnesses, including cancer. There’s good evidence to support the idea that the anti-oxidants in their diet are protecting them from cancer by attacking mutation-causing free radicals.

But when those anti-oxidants are extracted and turned into supplements, they have a very different effect from the foods in which they’re found. In a new study published in Science Translational Medicine, researchers from the Karolinska Institute report on a study that found antioxidants were responsible for speeding up the growth of melanomas; last year they reported a similar finding for antioxidants and lung cancer.

The Karolinska Institute’s Martin Bergö, a molecular biologist, hypothesizes that antioxidants are protecting cancer cells from free radicals. Cancer cells are particularly vulnerable to “oxidative stress” — the damage from free radicals, and this retards the spread of cancer, unless, that is, you’re megadosing on anti-oxidants…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘You’re so accustomed to everyone holding a phone, you might not even notice they’re missing.’

Source: Co.Exist

‘Thank you for your interest in our all-inclusive travel package to the fourth dimension. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions we get from prospective explorers. So far, none of our clients have returned—or even sent a text—so we can only share what our scientific consultants say will likely occur…’

Source: Chip Rowe, Nautilus

‘Someone has put high-quality signs on park benches in a fancy British town to mock its contemptuous treatment of locals, especially the poor. The signs have been removed, on the grounds that they might be “offensive.” ‘

Source: Boing Boing

‘Shawn James’ American Sanctuary warms the cold Colorado winter enough to get the locals joining in.‘

Source: Boing Boing

‘Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. “There is a theory,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,”that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced.

”But wait! “Is it ever possible on any scale,” he then tantalizingly asks, “to perhaps flip between different universes?” And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a “multiverse” in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: “If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency.” And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once.

Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist “no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes,” when “we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them.”’

Source: Open Culture

‘The past few years has seen “brain-to-brain communication” move from the realm of science fiction into reality. Numerous papers have reported on different brain-to-brain interface devices, of which a typical example is this 2014 report by Rajesh Rao and colleagues describing a device in which EEG is used to detect activity in one person’s brain, which then sends a message over the internet and then uses a TMS coil which generates a magnetic pulse that induces activity in the brain of another person.’

Source: Neuroskeptic

‘When Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered its meltdown in 2011, over 44,0000 workers helped safely take it offline. Now, more than four years later, comes the first diagnosis of cancer in a recovery worker to be linked to radiation exposure during the work…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Last Friday, London’s Royal Free Hospital announced that it was treating Pauline Cafferkey, a Scottish nurse who had served in Sierra Leone during this year’s West African outbreak, for what they termed “an unusual late complication” of Ebola. Somehow, the Ebola virus was once again raging through her system, nine months after her initial infection and recovery.

The case is dismaying, but it’s no freak occurrence. Even though the worst of the Ebola outbreak is over, the virus keeps reappearing—in survivors, new patients, and the press. In the past 24 hours, Ebola has struck two people in Guinea, and a paper out this week in the New England Journal of Medicine announced that Ebola patients still housed traces of the virus’s RNA up to nine months after they first showed symptoms. And even if they’re not wracked by the disease anymore, Ebola survivors suffer a whole range of maladies that come from the lingering virus: back pain, hearing loss, meningitis, seizures. (Though, thankfully, the survivors probably aren’t infectious.)

The WHO counts 42 days without new cases as the cut-off for a region to be Ebola-free (Guinea was weeks away), but they may need to rethink that length of time, or the very idea that a region can be Ebola-free, says Dan Kelly, an Ebola researcher at UC San Francisco.  To stretch the mole analogy, the squiggly virus collects in certain hidey-holes the immune system doesn’t patrol as well—eyes, brains, testes, and even semen—where it can then lurk for months before replicating and causing problems for its host. (In another study this week in NEJM, scientists found that Ebola can be transmitted through sex, which presents a whole ‘nother set of risks.) Scientists still don’t know how long Ebola stays infectious in the body.’

Source: WIRED

‘Fifty cultural heritage sites in 36 countries are threatened by everything from climate change and looting to natural disasters and commercial development, according to a report released Thursday by the World Monuments Fund.Compiled every two years, the World Monuments Watch list raises awareness and mobilizes funding for the preservation of endangered sites of outstanding significance. In its 20-year history, the program has named 790 sites in 135 countries and arranged roughly $350 million of financial support for treasured places around the world.POPULAR STORIES An Isolated Tribe Is Emerging From Peru’s Amazonian WildernessWill a New Bout of King Tut Fever Bring Visitors Back to Egypt?Will a New Bout of King Tut Fever Bring Visitors Back to Egypt?The 50 sites on the 2016 list range from World War II concentration camps in Italy to the approximately 5,000-year-old underwater city of Pavlopetri off the coast of the Southern Peloponnese in Greece.’

Source: National Geographic

‘Even though there have been incredible advancements in the field of prosthetics, including some more unorthodox ones, those who are unfortunate enough to lose a body part will be unable to replicate the sense of touch with their artificial limb. A remarkable new study by a team of Stanford University engineers, published today in Science, has perhaps begun to finally address this problem: they have created a plastic skin that can “feel,” transmitting sensory information as an electric signal to the brain.’

Source: IFLScience

‘As the Bennetts explain in the book, most people seek a therapist in an effort to actively deny that they don’t have any control over their emotions. Stuck in a neurotic, fruitless loop, people begin to wonder why they can’t achieve perpetual happiness or erase their proclivity to procrastinate. If they could just fix the things they see as broken, they could then become the people they’ve always wanted to be and finally begin their lives. But just how much control do you really have over your feelings or your essential nature? According to the Bennetts, much less than you would like to believe. Your efforts are better spent elsewhere. In this episode, listen as Michael and Sarah explain what you should be doing instead, and why they say – “Fuck feelings.” ‘

Source: Boing Boing

‘The Social Network is Yesterday, The Interest Feed is Tomorrow’

Source: Ian Rogers on Medium

‘A 10-year effort to identify the genes responsible for ageing has led to researchers finding 238 specific genes that, when removed, significantly extend the lifespan of yeast cells in laboratory testing.If the results of this genetic editing can be replicated in humans – which is a possibility, since many of the genes and genetic pathways involved are also found in higher life forms – we may be able to seriously boost human lifespans by turning off ageing processes. The researchers found that the life of yeast could be extended by as much as 60 percent in some circumstances…’

Source: ScienceAlert via Newsvine

‘There’s no way around it, the headlines are disturbing. And they come, not from tabloids or click-bait blogs, but from papers published in scientific journals. They describe fish and birds responding with altered behavior and reproductive systems to antidepressants, diabetes medication, and other psychoactive or hormonally active drugs at concentrations found in the environment. They report on opiods, amphetamines and other pharmaceuticals found in treated drinking water; antibiotics in groundwater capable of altering naturally occurring bacterial communities; and over-the-counter and prescription drugs found in water leaching from municipal landfills. And these are just some of many recent studies examining the countless pharmaceuticals that are now being found just about everywhere scientists have looked for them in the environment…’

Source: Vox

‘I noted the other day that since the early 1980s, the world has lost about half of its coral reefs. According to a recent study, there’s more to worry about in the sea: the ocean contains half the fish it did 45 years ago.’

Source: kottke

Five years ago, journalist Nicholas Carr wrote in his book The Shallows: How The Internet Is Changing Our Brains about the way technology seemed to be eroding his ability to concentrate. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” he wrote. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

In the book, which became a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Carr explored the many ways that technology might be affecting our brains. Carr became particularly concerned about how the Internet seemed to be impairing our ability to think deeply and to focus on one subject for extended periods.

Today, social media and digital devices have an arguably greater place in our lives and hold on our attention spans than they did in 2011. So what has  changed since Carr wrote his seminal work five years ago? We chatted with the journalist and author about how our increasing interactions with mobile technology might be affecting the most important organ in our bodies…’

Source: Huffington Post

‘Republicans have spectacularly failed their “prove we can govern” test, and that’s trouble for pretty much everyone…’

Source: Salon.com

The NRA encourages a culture of irresponsible gun ownership: ‘Those who oppose even the smallest movement towards better gun safety policies do so love to invoke the figure of the “responsible gun owner” as their reason for wanting more unfettered gun access. “Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for acts of criminals,” NRA head Wayne LaPierre said in his 2013 remarks to Congress. “Teaching safe and responsible gun ownership works.

”It all sounds good on paper, but Detroit got to see what that mentality actually looks like in practice this week, when a woman who was certified for concealed carry—meaning she had to take gun safety classes and everything—decided that the best way to deal with a shoplifting that had nothing whatsoever to do with her was to pull out her gun and open fire in a Home Depot parking lot. This is what you get from the simplistic dividing of people into “law-abiding” and “criminal”, as well as assuring people that taking a few classes makes you a responsible gun owner: A woman who was so sure of her righteousness and responsibility that it didn’t even occur to her not to do something so immoral and stupid. Immoral because under no circumstances should the penalty for shoplifting be death at the hands of a vigilante. Stupid because she was in a parking lot, where innocent people are milling around, with soft bodies that will take a stray bullet whether the NRA considers them law-abiding or not.

But the fact that there are idiots in this world isn’t the most troubling fact about this story. No, what is even more troubling is that the woman remains unarrested and uncharged, and may not be facing any criminal charges at all. Unfortunately, under Michigan law, it may not be possible to charge her with a crime at all because, foolishly, the state allows people to take potshots at people who are fleeing from the commission of a felony…’

Source: Salon.com

‘Earlier this summer, these two chimps received worldwide attention when activists with the Nonhuman Rights Project argued in a New York courtroom that Leo and Hercules should legally be considered people with a right to be free. Absent from those proceedings were Hercules and Leo themselves. News stories about the lawsuit—eventually dismissed, currently being appealed—were illustrated with stock chimpanzee photographs. A video accompanying the new study is the first chance most people will have to see the chimps, and their appearance raises anew the question: Is a chimpanzee a person?’

Source: National Geographic

‘The recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa has claimed the lives of over 11,000 people to date, mainly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, as reported by BBC News. Today, it is a pleasure to report that these three countries at the very heart of the deadly epidemic have recorded their first week with no new cases since the outbreak began in March of last year…’

Source: IFLScience

‘It’s getting more difficult for new painkilling drugs to be approved because the rate of effectiveness vs. placebos in drug tests is falling. But oddly, the drop is only being seen in the US. Based on patients’ ratings of their pain, the effect of trialled drugs in relieving symptoms stayed the same over the 23-year period — but placebo responses rose. In 1996, patients in clinical trials reported that drugs relieved their pain by 27% more than did a placebo. But by 2013, that gap had slipped to just 9%. The phenomenon is driven by 35 US trials; among trials in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, there was no significant change in placebo responses. The analysis is in press in the journal Pain…’

Source: Kottke

Boy, 11, asks girl, 8, to see her puppies. She declines. He shoots and kills her. ‘Authorities in Tennessee say an 11-year-old boy has been detained on first-degree murder charges after shooting and killing an 8-year-old neighbor with a shotgun because she would not show him her pet puppies. The gun belonged to the boy’s father. The two kids went to the same school…’

Source: Boing Boing

“New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto,” NASA noted in the press release. NASA doesn’t know yet why water appears on some regions of Pluto and not others, but it notes that Pluto’s watery regions are a deep red color.“I’m surprised that this water ice is so red,” Silvia Protopapa, New Horizons scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “We don’t yet understand the relationship between water ice and the reddish tholin colorants on Pluto’s surface.”..’

Source: Motherboard

‘We finally got a full-color view of Pluto’s skies—and they look awfully familiar.

NASA just released its first color view of those planetary hazes they’ve been so curious about. And, it turns out that, just like Earth, Pluto has some bright blue skies arching overhead..’

Source: Gizmodo

‘New data collected by the Curiosity rover shows that Mars was once quite Earth-like, featuring river deltas, lakes, and a warm climate. What’s more, the Red Planet may have been able to sustain liquid water at the surface long enough for life to emerge and evolve…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘In the weeks and months after my father died, “How are you?” became my least favorite question. It was always benign and well-intentioned, but it also inevitably reminded me that I felt like shit. I’d rather have given a gruesome blow-by-blow account of how my father died than talk about how I felt. But talking—or, more importantly, finding someone who will listen—is what grieving people so desperately need.

There is a gulf between mourners and the rest of the world. We want to talk, but we don’t want to make people uncomfortable. We can tell they want to say something, but they don’t know how. But how the hell do you talk to a grieving person? It can be baffling, especially when a simple “Hey, what’s up?” can set someone off.

But you have to start somewhere. “I think it’s important for people who haven’t lost someone to say, ‘I have no idea what you’re going through, but I’m here to listen,’” my friend Tessa told me of her own experience mourning her father. “And for people that have been through it, share that. It makes us feel less alone, I think.”

True, you might say the wrong thing! It’s okay, though…’

Source: Dead Spin

‘The Dallas Six is a group of prisoners who were beaten, shocked and gassed by prison guards who had previously beaten them in retaliation for complaints about abuse in solitary confinement.

The letters of grievance the men sent were intercepted by guards who violently retaliated against them, sparking a nonviolent protest (the men covered the windows of their cells). This, in turn, was used as a pretense for “cell extractions” during which the non-violent prisoners were beaten, shocked, gassed and left in their underwear, covered in gas residue, shackled in stress positions.

Prosectors collaborated with the guards who attacked the men, bringing trumped up assault charges against the men for allegedly resisting the guards, though the videos don’t support the charge (the prosectors have argued against introducing the videos into evidence).

The story of the Dallas 6 is a microcosm for the everyday torture in the American penal system, which imprisons more people than any other country in the world’s history. It’s not a coincidence that the Dallas 6 are black, nor that they began their journey into the penal system with zero-tolerance busts for petty crap like shouting at their elementary school teachers.

Molly Crabapple’s reporting on the Dallas 6 is a must-read, and her accompanying illustrations are beautiful and haunting.’

Source: Boing Boing

The accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 had a devastating impact on the local population and forced 116,000 people to permanently leave their homes. But now researchers have discovered that, while the people may not have returned, the contaminated area of Belarus is teeming with wild animals, including elk, wild boar, deer and wolves. Perhaps surprisingly, many of these numbers seem to be on the rise and some of them are higher than in uncontaminated areas.

The abandoned area around the nuclear power plant, known as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, includes about 4750 square kilometres of land in both Ukraine and Belarus. The contamination in the exclusion zone is patchy, as the distribution of radioactive isotopes on the ground was influenced by the weather conditions at the time of the accident and the days following it. The radiation levels have reduced over the nearly 30 years since the accident, but in many parts of the zone they are too high for people to return.

Source: Gizmodo

‘Reddit is launching a brand new website today to unearth news from its social aggregator. Called Upvoted, the site will surface pictures, videos and commentary from Reddit and present it as news — without the option to comment on a single thing.Wired reports that the new website, which is set to launch later today, “looks and feels much like any other news site out there.” That means you should expect stories, pictures, videos, infographics, podcasts and the like, covering anything from politics and science to sports and, presumably, cats. The Verge suggests that the new website will dig a little deeper, too, “providing more context on their background through interviews with the Reddit users behind the stories” — something that will be powered by a dedicated editorial team.’

Source: Gizmodo

President Obama is clearly fed up. His speeches after mass shootings — speeches that have become a bit of a morbid ritual, given how regularly the shootings occur — have grown angrier, more emotional, and more disgusted at America’s gun violence problem and Congress’s unwillingness to do literally anything to stop it. “This is a political choice that we make,” Obama declared Thursday night, after the 294th mass shooting of 2015, “to allow this to happen every few months in America.”But let’s be clear about precisely what kind of choice this is. Congress’s decision not to pass background checks is not what’s keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What’s behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.

Source: Vox

That is the question that physicist Lawrence Krauss answers in his book, A Universe from Nothing. The book’s trailer provides a little more context. Everything we see is just a 1% bit of cosmic pollution in a Universe dominated by dark matter and dark energy. You could get rid of all the things in the night sky — the stars, the galaxies, the planets, everything — and the Universe would be largely the same.And my favorite line from the trailer: Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born.

Source: Kottke

‘Scientists have just uncovered one of the largest tsunami events in the geologic record, and naturally, it started with an epic splash. 73,000 years ago, the eastern flank of Cape Verde’s Fogo volcano collapsed into the sea, kicking up an 800-foot wave.

Think about that for a sec. That’s two thirds the height of the Empire State Building. If a mega-tsunami of that size struck a coastal city today, the consequences would be pretty apocalyptic. And such events aren’t outside the realm of possibility.

“Most of these fairly young oceanic volcanoes — such as in the Azores and the Canary Islands and Hawaii — are incredibly high and steep, so the potential energy for a collapse to happen again is there,”said Ricardo Ramalho, a co-author on a study describing the mega-tsunami that was published this week in Science Advances.’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The ghost shark is creepy as hell. It floats around the darkest part of the ocean looking like a fallen angel that just clawed its way out of hell. It’s not entirely a shark. It’s more like a shark’s earlier, eerier relative.’

Source: io9

‘In a fascinating piece in this month’s Atlantic, UC Berkeley professor Alison Gopnik details her four year journey out of a mid-life crisis via David Hume and Buddhism. The just-turned-fifty Gopnik begins reading Buddhism, connects the religion’s ideas to those of the eighteenth century philosopher, then launches an ambitious research project driven by the question of how Hume came up with his philosophy that was “so profoundly at odds with the Western philosophy and religion of his day.”

Hume is most famous for his rejection of the idea of an inherent self. He also had gone through a psychological crisis. To help calm his nerves, he moved to small town in France and finished what would become one of the most substantial works of Western philosophy–A Treatise of Human Nature. Relying on the hunch that Hume would have had to have known something about Buddhist philosophy in order to write Treatise, Gopnik digs through archives and travels to Europe to discover that the Jesuit priests in that provincial French town had indeed heard of Buddhism and possibly even had copies of certain Tibetan texts. Although she admits that she can’t be certain, she determines that “Hume could indeed have known about Buddhist philosophy” at the time he wrote Treatise.

If true, this discovery would be remarkable because it’s widely assumed that Buddhism didn’t make it to the European continent until the nineteenth century.’

Source: Big Think

Related articles

• David Hume wise quotes
• How David Hume Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis
• David Hume got it, so why hasn’t 21st century politics?

‘For years, scientists have known that Mars has ice locked away within its rusty exterior. More elusive, though, is figuring out how much of that water is actually sloshing around in liquid form. Now, NASA scientists have found compelling evidence that liquid water—life-giving, gloriously wet H 20—exists on Mars.

We’re not talking gushing rivers or oceans here. These scientists have been investigating “recurring slope lineae,” patches of precipitated salt that appear to dribble down Mars’ steep slopes like tears rolling gently down a cheek. Planetary scientists hypothesized that the streaky formations were products of the flow of water, but they didn’t have concrete, mineralogical evidence for that idea until now, says Lujendra Ojha, a scientist at Georgia Tech who first spotted the lineae back in 2010. In a new Nature Geoscience paper, published online today, Ojha and his colleagues present “smoking gun validation” that it was liquid water flowing on Mars’ surface that formed these tear stains.’

Source: WIRED

‘Sure, Boehner’s hardly been a ally of the Democratic Party during his tenure. Given who’s waiting in the on-deck circle, however, it might be smart to jam the corks back in the champagne bottles and hold off on the onslaught of celebratory Facebook memes.’

Source: Salon.com

‘Last night the world was lucky enough to see a supermoon lunar eclipse. Hopefully you got to see it in person—but if not, here are some of the best pictures so far of the stellar spectacle.’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Currently sitting on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk is a bill that, if signed into law, would allow doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs. Not surprisingly, this is controversial. Proponents believe the law would save diseased people from the worst days of their prognoses. Opponents say the law violates the sanctity of life, and can be exploited by ill-meaning family, physicians, and insurance companies at the patient’s expense.

But there’s a third group who believe this debate misses the real problem: that the American health care system is just an all around miserable place to die.’

Source: WIRED

‘IF YOU’RE A science fiction or fantasy fan, chances are you’ve heard a language constructed by David J. Peterson. He created both Dothraki and Valyrian for HBO’s Game Of Thrones, as well as written or spoken languages for Thor: The Dark World, SyFy’s Defiance and Dominion, and The CW’s The 100 and Star-Crossed. And in becoming the most recognizable name in the conlang (constructed language) community, he’s been instrumental in raising not just awareness of constructed languages, but their quality as well. By now, viewers expect their alien or foreign tongues to sound like they have syntax and grammar. No longer would a scene like this one from Return of the Jedi—Princess Leia/bounty hunter Boushh speaking fictional language Ubese to Jabba—pass muster.

Peterson has already written a guide to Dothraki, but his new book has even larger ambitions. The Art of Language Invention, out tomorrow, is a combination knowledge base and history lesson for those interested in constructing languages. It’s a distillation of the knowledge Peterson gained from the original email listserv that popularized the term “conlang,” blended with some of what he studied as a linguistics Ph.D. student at UC San Diego. But while it’s presented as an introduction for anyone interested in learning more about conlangs, it’s still incredibly dense. Unless you’ve taken a fair amount of linguistics, or are innately familiar with phonetic inventories and symbols, there’s a high barrier to entry for the average pop culture fan curious about how Dothraki came to be. The best parts of the book come at the end of the four main sections, where Peterson presents case studies on issues he face in creating languages for Game Of Thrones and Defiance, and how the knowledge he gained from the online community and his university training assisted in construction.

So rather than trying to explicate the book for you, we talked to Peterson himself—focusing on the community at large and its changing place in popular culture. Not surprisingly, he’s got some bold ideas for how the conlang community is dealing with being under a spotlight, and how innovative language creation can aid humanity’s future.’

Source: WIRED

Frank Skinner once admitted that new girlfriends were always “subjected to the Laurel and Hardy test”, when he would play a video of the Laurel and Hardy dance sequence from Way Out West. “If she didn’t laugh, I instantly wrote her off as a future companion,” said Skinner, conceding that this wasn’t exactly rational behaviour.

Perhaps we can all be divided by that Laurel and Hardy test. Those who love the Way Out West dance, which captures perfectly the charm and on-screen chemistry of the comedy duo, will already have been delighted by the news that the BBC1 is to show in 2015 a one-off 90-minute drama called Stan and Ollie – written by Jeff Pope of Philomena note – which is based around their 1953 tour of the UK, during which Hardy suffered a heart attack.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

The internet’s villain of the month is easily Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. In August, Turing, a pharma startup that had just received its first round of financing, bought the rights to manufacture an anti-parasitic drug called Daraprim. Turing’s first act was to jack the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per tablet, inciting much justifiable outrage.

Here’s the thing though: The drug was already priced outrageously and prohibitively. Daraprim is a very old and off-patent drug—just a few years ago, when the drug was still being manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, it cost $1 per pill. When GSK sold it to CorePharma in 2010 (CorePharma was eventually bought by Impax Labs, who sold the drug to Turing), the price went up to $13.50. Which is indeed much cheaper than $750 per pill, but relative cheapness doesn’t translate to accessibility. For many patients, a $13.50 daily medication might as well cost $750.

Source: Motherboard

‘False equivalence, for those joining us late, is the almost irresistible instinct in mainstream journalism to present differing views as being equally valid “sides” of an argument, even if one of them is objectively true and the rest are not.

False equivalence: “President Obama claims that he was born in the United States and thus is eligible to serve as president; his critics disagree on both counts.”

Actual truth: “Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961; a persistent ‘birther’ movement denies this fact.”

As chronicled over the years in posts collected here, the “both sides make their claims, who are we to judge?” reflex is very powerful in our business. That is largely because we’re most comfortable when acting in the role of a referee at a sporting event, a judge at a trial, a moderator at a debate, or some similar figure letting presumptively legitimate contenders fight it out on their own. To intervene directly and say “There are two sides here, but one of them is bunk” is uncomfortable, because it seems “partisan.” It is also risky, because it requires the reporter to learn enough about an issue to judge claims of relative truth.

Our friends at WNYC’s On the Media—Brooke Gladstone, Bob Garfield, and their team, whom I know and like—have done two very strong recent episodes on the false-equivalence snarl. In general you should listen to their show, but here are two especially worth seeking out.’

Source: The Atlantic

Via The New York Times: ‘Health-scare stories, even those that are not overblown, draw their special power from the fact that we go through the days denying our mortality. Each one reminds us anew that there’s no way out. Unable to avoid this tragic and absurd-seeming condition, we lash out against our fates by finding fresh reasons to make a villain out of the one thing that is doing its part to keep us alive: food. We add salt to the psychic wound when we momentarily trick ourselves into believing that bugs, worms and dirt are the only things fit for human consumption. I’m not falling for it anymore. I’m going back to bologna and cheese…’

‘A full moon, harvest moon, super moon, and total eclipse of the moon—this one has it all.’

Source: National Geographic

(Of course, lunar eclipses are always full moons…)

‘If you think America is unpopular in the world now, listen to some of the stuff they said about the country (and continent) in the late 1700s. European scientists came up with the “Theory of Degeneracy” to explain how terrible America was.’

Source: io9

Not only do we have a propensity for lying, we have built-in barriers that prevent us from detecting others when they do… People are social beings who require constant interaction and communication in order to survive. If we were constantly suspicious that everyone was lying, we’d probably all be holed up in a cabin like the Unabomber.

Source: Big Think

There was a time when the Food and Drug Administration was so sluggish and conservative in approving new drugs that people who desperately needed access to medicines would die waiting.

But fast forward to the early 1990s. By then, Congress had created four programs to expedite the development and approval process for new pharmaceuticals. These pathways were intended to push innovative new drugs — drugs to treat rare, serious, or life-threatening diseases — through the FDA more quickly.

Since these medicines were sorely needed, the idea was that rushing them through, often on the basis of more limited and preliminary clinical trials data, would help patients languishing with unmet medical needs.

Today, the FDA is now considered the fastest regulatory agency in the world. But there’s some concern that these expedited pathways are being used by drug companies to speed through medicines that aren’t actually helping patients with unmet medical needs — and that often aren’t any improvement over what’s already on the market.

Source: Vox

Attention driver’s license holders from the great lands of New York, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and American Samoa: The Department of Homeland Security has no love for you.

[Update: Let’s add Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington to the list.]

In 2016, the final phase of the Real ID Act—passed in Congress way back in 2005 under the recommendation of your friends at the 9/11 Commission (never forget)—goes into effect. The Real ID Act defines “real IDs” as those that are obtained only with proof of U.S. citizenship. In the aforementioned States of the Damned, driver’s licenses do not require proof of citizenship and are considered “non-compliant” with the Real ID act, and thus they will no longer be acceptable forms of identification when boarding federally regulated commercial aircraft. This is a significant setback, as Travel + Leisure reports, because 38% of Americans don’t have passports.

Source: Flygirl

‘Earlier this year, a scan of 100,000 galaxies showed no signs of alien mega-civilizations, dashing the hopes of those longing for a close encounter of the extra-terrestrial kind. A follow-up analysis of the data suggests it’s even worse than we thought, concluding that advanced galaxy-spanning civilizations don’t exist in the local universe.’

Source: io9

“And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”. The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers.

Only it was a fake. It’s fairly easy to find photo or video ‘evidence’ to bolster a scurrilous political position (in this case, the anti-immigration argument that we are allowing Islamist infiltration), and the resulting misinformation can easily go viral. Corrections by investigative journalists or private citizens do not get anything like the notice that the original lies did. Here are six tools for digital information verification.

Source: Gizmodo

It’s normally just researchers that get to experiment at the LHC. But one physicist has decided to invite a series of bands to play around at the world’s largest science lab — and this is the result.

The first event of a new an initiative called Ex/Noise/CERN, that’s led by Dr. James Beacham, saw the experimental indie band Deerhoof set up their gear in CERN’s magnet test facility. In a press release, Beacham described what he was hoping to achieve:

“Musical curiosity is similar to scientific curiosity and, on a personal level, Deerhoof has inspired me as much as Einstein. They’re explorers and this sense of exploration is what you feel in the air at CERN right now, and so the pairing of Deerhoof and CERN was natural.”

This particular musical outing was in honour of the LHC’s recent ramp up to 13 TeV. The idea was to “draw inspiration from CERN physics and create impromptu musical arrangements amongst CERN equipment.”

The video below captures some of what happened during the day. It might not be melodic indie pop, but it is certainly interesting and exploratory kind of hard to understand, a bit like a musical version of what happens at CERN.

Source: Gizmodo

Via Flightclub: ‘Club Concorde, a group of ex-pilots, maintainers, engineers, airline execs and ConcVia : ‘orde enthusiasts has unveiled a plan that aims to put a Concorde back in the air by 2019, and supposedly they have a pile of cash to see their plans through to fruition.

It has been more than a decade since Concorde took its last flight, ending its career on October 24th, 2003. Examples are now strewn across the globe in the aviation museums and science centers where they were sent with no intention of ever flying again. As such, it is not as if you can just go out and buy a surplus Concorde.

…Or can you?..’

Via Motherboard: ‘On Thursday, Science magazine published a crucial and overdue commentary lamenting the current state of wildfire management on US public lands. Among the authors was Malcolm North, a plant ecologist at the US Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station in California.

As it turns out, the USFS was none too pleased about the piece or North’s name being attached to it. According to Valley Public Radio, the central California NPR affiliate, the agency has barred North from discussing the paper and had even attempted to prevent Science from publishing it.

“The Pacific Southwest Research Station says its role is to conduct and publish research, not to evaluate land management policy,” VPR’s Amy Quinton reports. “Editors at Science refused to hold the article from publication or remove North’s name and affiliation. A disclaimer was added telling readers that the content does not necessarily reflect the views of the US Forest Service.”

The Science commentary, which Motherboard covered in more depth here, basically argues that we’re doing wildfires all wrong. 98 percent of all fires are quashed before they can grow in size and consume their host forests’ overaccumulation of fuels. And so the accumulation continues year after year until a deadly, catastrophic wildfire hurricane shreds 70,000 acres in a weekend…’

Via BBC – Earth: ‘We think of psychological disorders like anxiety and depression as uniquely human problems, but many other species could be suffering from them too…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘Last Friday evening, numerous people in Jakarta, Indonesia reported and recorded mysterious, low trumpet-like sounds in the sky. Listen for yourself below. Scientists often try to explain away these strange noises as “Earth sounds” caused by shifting tectonic plates, atmospheric phenomena, geomagnetic activity, or the like. But we all know it’s really the trumpets of the apocalypse…”

Via Boing Boing: ‘Omar Ghabra won Twitter with these photos, and this quip: “An Arab-looking man of Syrian descent in a garage w/his accomplice building what appears to be a bomb. Arrest them.”The tweet was a response to the story everyone’s outraged about today: Ahmed Mohamed, the kid in Texas whose wonderful homemade clock sparked a racist reply by his school, and by authorities.Apple founder Steve Jobs, seen here in classic “garage” photos with Steve Wozniak, was the son of a Syrian migrant to the United States…’

Via The Ohio State University (thanks to Boing Boing): ‘Scientists have developed and validated a new method to identify which people are narcissistic: Just ask them.In a series of 11 experiments involving more than 2,200 people of all ages, the researchers found they could reliably identify narcissistic people by asking them this exact question (including the note):To what extent do you agree with this statement: “I am a narcissist.” (Note: The word “narcissist” means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)Participants rated themselves on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me).(How narcissistic are you? Take the test here.)Brad BushmanResults showed that people’s answer to this question lined up very closely with several other validated measures of narcissism, including the widely used Narcissistic Personality Inventory….’

Via Gawker: ‘After nearly three hours of monotone droning by a bunch of sweaty old people who will almost certainly never be president, tonight’s Republican debate finally delivered with a bizarre question about potential Secret Service names that produced incredibly absurd answers from every single candidate.

The final segment of the debate was devoted to free association-style questions. The dais was first asked which woman they would put on the $10 bill, with the most popular answer being: myyyy wiiiife. Then each candidate was prompted to offer what their Secret Service code name would be if they were elected president, and holy hell was each answer absolutely nuts.Here are the candidates’ real, actual answers, each of which delivers such a perfect morsel of conservative id:

• Chris Christie: “True Heart”
• John Kasich: “Unit One”
• Carly Fiorina: “Secretariat”
• Scott Walker: “Harley”
• Jeb Bush: “Ever-Ready”
• Donald Trump: “Humble”
• Ben Carson: “One Nation”
• Ted Cruz: “Cohiba”
• Marco Rubio: “Gator”
• Mike Huckabee: “Duck Hunter”
• Rand Paul: “Justice Never Sleeps”

Cohiba! Duck Hunter! Justice Never Sleeps! Secretariat!!!I swear this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.’

 

Via The Independent: ‘French scientists are preparing to wake up a 30,000-year-old ‘giant’ virus.

A team from the French National Centre for Scientific Research discovered the prehistoric virus, called Mollivirus sibericum, underground in north-eastern Siberian permafrost, reports CNET.

And now they plan to give it its first “wake-up call” since the last Ice Age…’

Via NASA: ‘New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.

“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa…’

Via i09: ‘A provocative new paper published in Nature suggests that neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s may be transmissible through certain medical procedures. It’s an alarming claim—but one that will require more proof if it’s to be accepted by the scientific community.

… While performing an autopsy on eight individuals who died between the ages of 36 and 51, and who caught their CJD from contaminated HGH injections, the researchers unexpectedly discovered severe to moderate grey matter and vascular amyloid beta pathology in four of them. This was a surprise because of the relatively young age of the subjects, and because none of these patients had problematic mutations or predispositions to Alzheimer’s.

The researchers suspect that, when these individuals were administered their HGH treatments, the growth hormone was also contaminated with the amyloid beta protein, which then spread through their brains. This would suggest that the “seeds” responsible for certain neurodegenerative diseases can be transmitted during certain medical procedures or via contaminated surgical instruments…’

Via io9: ‘A small but vocal contingent of researchers – addressing fields ranging from physics to medicine to economics – has maintained that many, perhaps most, published studies are wrong. But how bad is this problem, exactly? And what features make a study more or less likely to turn out to be true?

We are two of the 270 researchers who together have just published in the journal Science the first-ever large-scale effort trying to answer these questions by attempting to reproduce 100 previously published psychological science findings…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘According to a New York Times article published in June 1927, a man with the name and address of Donald Trump’s father was arraigned after Klan members attacked cops in Queens, N.Y.nyttrump In an article subtitled “Klan assails policeman”, Fred Trump is named in among those taken in during a late May “battle” in which “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all.”

…To be clear, this is not proof that Trump senior—who would later go on to become a millionaire real estate developer—was a member of the Ku Klux Klan or even in attendance at the event. Despite sharing lawyers with the other men, it’s conceivable that he may have been an innocent bystander, falsely named, or otherwise the victim of mistaken identity during or following a chaotic event…’

Via Boing Boing: ‘The National Geographic magazine has been a nonprofit publication since inception in 1888, but that ends today. The long-running American publication becomes very much for-profit under a $725 million dollar deal announced today with 21st Century Fox, the entertainment company controlled by the family of Rupert Murdoch.Murdoch is a notorious climate change denier, and his family’s Fox media empire is the world’s primary source of global warming misinformation. Which would be no big deal here, I guess, were it not for the fact that the National Geographic Society’s mission includes giving grants to scientists…’

Via Big Think: ‘Near the end of his life, during a trip to Asia in 1968, Trappist monk, poet, theologian, and social activist Thomas Merton (shown below) came away from seeing ancient carved Buddhas deeply moved. “I don’t know what else remains,” Merton wrote, “but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.” Merton studied comparative theology not to reduce other faiths to some shadow of his own Christianity, but rather to synthesize them into some deeper, common belief that “pierced through the surface” to get “beyond the shadow and disguise.”

Zen Buddhism struck a chord within Merton as achieving the same sense of interior wholeness that mystics such as Meister Eckhart and St. John of the Cross had in the Christian tradition. For Merton, a man deeply steeped in words, however, writing failed to convey the wordless qualities of Zen. A Hidden Wholeness: The Zen Photography of Thomas Merton, a new exhibition to mark the centennial of Merton’s birth, demonstrates how Merton found in photography the perfect medium for his Zen studies, not just to make images of Zen, but also to practice Zen itself…’

For those of you still reading this as a weblog, at Follow Me Here… , you know the sidebar is still here, it is just hidden. You can click on the icon (three horizontal bars) in the upper right corner to reveal. How do you like the redesign?

“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

Via Quanta Magazine: ‘Explore the deepest mysteries at the frontier of fundamental physics, and the most promising ideas put forth to solve them….’

Via The Atlantic: Getting rid of belongings is generally seen as positive, even healthy—but when the need becomes compulsive, it can be a sign of a life-consuming disorder. And the cultural embrace of decluttering can make it hard for someone who does it compulsively to get help.

Via NYTimes.com: ’For generations, freshmen cadets at the United States Military Academy have marked the end of a grueling summer of training with a huge nighttime pillow fight that is billed as a harmless way to blow off steam and build class spirit.

But this year the fight on the West Point, N.Y., campus turned bloody as some cadets swung pillowcases packed with hard objects, thought to be helmets, that split lips, broke at least one bone, dislocated shoulders and knocked cadets unconscious. The brawl at the publicly funded academy, where many of the Army’s top leaders are trained, left 30 cadets injured, including 24 with concussions, according to West Point…’

9to5Google, via Paper

Via Boing Boing: ‘In the book The Man Who Wasn’t There, Anil Ananthaswamy explores mysteries of self, including the weirdness of autoscopic phenomena, a kind of hallucination in which you are convinced that you are having an out-of-body experience or face to face with your non-existent twin. From a BBC feature based on one of the book chapters…’

Of the lectures I have given, one of those that most fascinated my audience, and which I have therefore rolled out over and over to entertain, has been a roundup of odd and offbeat psychiatric disorders. These include autoscopic phenomena, as noted above, as well as Fregoli, Cotard’s, apotemnophilia, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, Munchausen’s (of course) and my personal favorite, Capgras, about some of which I have written here in the past and all of which challenge fundamental aspects of our perception of reality. Do a Google search on “odd unusual psychiatric|psychological syndromes” to explore these topics further.

Related articles

• How Neuroscience Is Helping Answer the Question ‘Who Am I?’
• Sleep paralysis, a feeling of being conscious and unable to move, hits sleep-deprived hard

Via Vox: ‘On Sunday, the Obama administration announced that the peak formerly known as Mount McKinley will henceforth be known as “Denali,” its traditional Native Alaskan name.The mountain was officially named after President William McKinley in 1917, a gesture originally proposed by an Alaska gold prospector in recognition of McKinley’s support for the gold standard.The Denali name is widely supported by Alaskans regardless of ethnicity.Politicians from McKinley’s home state of Ohio are leading the opposition to the change.’

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• Ohio Gov. Kasich opposes changing name of Mount McKinley

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Via The Atlantic: ‘From Berlin to Beijing, it seems just about anywhere is a bit like New York’s hippest borough….’

Via Salon.com: ‘The monster hunter isn’t quitting.

Do not believe the news reports that pinged around the world last month faster than the flick of a dragon’s tail.

Steve Feltham, full-time professional seeker of the Loch Ness Monster, holder of the Guinness World Record for longest continuous vigil for “Nessie,” has reached no conclusions about the cryptid that may or may not inhabit this freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands.

He has not determined that Nessie is a giant catfish. He has not ended his search. He is not walking away from his dream.

“I’m not leaving Loch Ness,” Feltham, 52, says in a video filmed inside the van where he lives and posted to his website. “Never have intended to. Never will, until we solve this mystery.”..’

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• “I’m not leaving until we solve this mystery”: Meet the world’s foremost Loch Ness Monster hunter
• Lizard Man May Have Returned to South Carolina
• Torn From The Headlines: Scary Beasties Of British Folklore…
• Image of fabled sea serpent of Ireland retrieved
• Eilean Muireach aka Cherry Island: Only Island in Loch Ness Is Crannog
• Monster Hunter Believes Loch Ness Monster May Be Giant Catfish
• Observer and Observed

Via Salon.com: ‘Mike Huckabee. Scott Walker. Ben Carson. Each candidate’s grasp of basic biology is more tenuous than the next’s..’

Via Independent.UK: ‘Put simply, Danish researchers behind a new study believe that without humans, most of northern Europe would be home to bears, elephants and rhinoceroses: areas where they were historically hunted to extinction by Homo sapiens…’

Unsurprising.

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• Without humans, the whole world could look like Serengeti
• Humans not climate responsible for lack of large mammal diversity around the world
• What Will The World Be Like Without Humans? These Maps Will Give You An Idea
• If Humans Never Existed, The World Would Have More Mammals

Via Matti Viikate – Newsvine: ‘Synthetic marijuana, also referred to as ‘replacement cannabis’, ‘K2’, and ‘Spice’, is a lab-produced mind-altering drug that aims to mimic the effects of marijuana, but is known to have unpredictable and sometimes dangerous effects, despite its marketing as a safe, legal alternative to marijuana. New York City’s police commissioner, William Bratton, recently said that the drug, which he referred to as “weaponised marijuana” is of “great and growing concern” to the city’s police force, which has seen a spike in hospitalisations from the drug..’

Via IFLScience: ‘After the heartbreaking tale of the famous lone Grand Canyon wolf, the first one in the area for 70 years, that was shot dead around Christmas last year, it’s time we had some good news. A pack of wolves has managed to establish itself in California…’

Via Antonia Malchick – Aeon: ‘For decades, Americans have been losing their ability, even their right, to walk. There are places in the United States – New York City, for example – where people walk as a matter of habit and lifestyle, commuting in ways familiar to residents of London or Paris. But there are vast blankets and folds of the country where the ability to walk – to open a door and step outside and go somewhere or nowhere without getting behind the wheel of a car – is a struggle, a fight. A risk…’

Via Walter Glannon – Aeon: ‘New brain implants can restore autonomy to damaged minds, but can they settle the question of whether free will exists? …’

Via IFLScience: ‘Forget LSD: eyes are the new high. Of course, we’re not talking about consuming them, but rather staring intensely into a pair for a prolonged period of time. Apparently, this can make people enter into an altered state of consciousness.

This intriguing discovery was made by vision researcher Giovanni Caputo from the University of Urbino in Italy, but it isn’t his first staring contest study. A few years ago, the scientist recruited 50 volunteers and got them to gaze upon their reflections in a mirror for 10 minutes in a dimly lit room. For many of them, it took less than one minute to start experiencing something trippy.

Their faces began to warp and change, taking on the appearance of animals, monsters or even deceased family members; a phenomenon imaginatively named the “strange-face illusion.” But it seems the bizarre effects are even more dramatic when the mirror is swapped for another person…’

Via National Geographic: ‘On International Orangutan Day, we take a look at these lovable tree-dwelling apes, whose numbers are plummeting fast due to deforestation.

Solitary and intelligent, the orangutan is the only great ape native to Asia—but it’s possible the continent may soon have none. That’s because orangutan numbers are dwindling as the animals are driven from their habitats by deforestation for palm oil plantations.

The island of Borneo may house only 54,000 of the endangered animal, and on Sumatra (map), just 6,600 remain, according to WWF. That’s a drop from possibly 230,000 of the primates a century ago.

But there’s one bright spot for this fiery-furred ape: Many companies have committed to only using palm oil from areas that weren’t destroyed by logging…’

Via IFLScience: ‘In what is sure to be highly controversial research, a new study claims to be able to predict a person’s risk of committing suicide with over 90% accuracy, using only a blood test coupled with a questionnaire.

According to the researchers from Indiana University School of Medicine, they have developed a simple test that looks for 11 biomarkers in a patient’s blood. When they coupled this with an app-based questionnaire, they say they were able to predict which individuals in a group of patients already being treated for psychiatric disorders would go on to develop suicidal thoughts over a period of two years…’

Via Quanta Magazine: ‘The physicist James Bullock explains how a complicated “dark sector” of interacting particles may illuminate some puzzling observations of the centers of galaxies…’

Via National Geographic: ‘After a Yellowstone grizzly with cubs killed a hiker, the park’s chief faced an agonizing decision—whether to let the bear go free or put her down…’