Via io9: ‘In whats being called one of the most important advances to date in the field, researchers at Harvard have used stem cells to create insulin-producing beta cells in large quantities. Human transplantation trials could only be a few years away.

By using human embryonic stem cells, a research team led by Doug Melton created human insulin-producing beta cells that are virtually equivalent to normally functional beta cells in the kind of large quantities required for cell transplantation and pharmaceutical purposes.’

Via Sploid: ‘On its 100th anniversary, The Great Martian War tells the story of the catastrophic events and unimaginable horrors of 1913-17, when Humankind was pitted against a savage Alien invasion.’

Via Gizmodo: ‘Time travel is possible—or at least a lot of serious physicists say so. Its probably not possible to pull it off in a souped-up Delorean, but there are wormholes, Tipler cylinders, and other Einstein-inspired theories for how it could work. Which raises the question: Why havent we met any visitors from another time?It sounds like a silly question, but its one that many scientists actually take very seriously. Meeting someone from the future would, of course, serve as definitive proof that we can indeed travel through time, and that would be a quite a simple way to solve a huge scientific riddle. So its no surprise that a handful of enthusiasts and experts have staged experiments in order to attract the time travelers that could be hiding among us.

One of them is Stephen Hawking. The renowned physicist totally believes time travel is a scientific possibility, and even says he knows how to build a time machine. He also famously wondered, “If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” Its a good question. Heres how weve tried to answer it…’

Via NYTimes.com: ‘A few days ago, I was on a panel on Bill Maher’s television show on HBO that became a religious war.

Whether or not Islam itself inspires conflict, debates about it certainly do. Our conversation degenerated into something close to a shouting match and went viral on the web. Maher and a guest, Sam Harris, argued that Islam is dangerous yet gets a pass from politically correct liberals, while the actor Ben Affleck denounced their comments as “gross” and “racist.” I sided with Affleck.After the show ended, we panelists continued to wrangle on the topic for another hour with the cameras off. Maher ignited a debate that is rippling onward, so let me offer three points of nuance…’

Via IFLScience: ‘Today a New York court will decide whether or not Tommy the Chimpanzee qualifies as a legal person. Tommy, a chimpanzee in his 20s, became well-known late last year when lawyer Steven Wise discovered him being held in a small, unclean cage and receiving inadequate care.

It is important to note that even if Tommy is declared a legal person, it does not mean he is human with human rights. Legally speaking, it would just afford him protection beyond existing animal cruelty laws. Personhood would give him rights pertaining to his self interest that would hold up in a court of law, similar to a parent or guardian acting on behalf of a child or disabled adult. Last year, India made headlines when they granted dolphins the status of nonhuman persons.’

Via laughingsquid.com: ‘A simulation by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research ICRAR shows what the collision between our own Milky Way Galaxy and the nearby Andromeda Galaxy will look like in approximately five billion years. The video represents gasses in the galaxies in blue and newly formed stars in red.’

Via alphagalileo.org: ‘The results of a four-year international study of 2060 cardiac arrest cases across 15 hospitals published and available now on ScienceDirect. The study concludes:

· The themes relating to the experience of death appear far broader than what has been understood so far, or what has been described as so called near-death experiences.· In some cases of cardiac arrest, memories of visual awareness compatible with so called out-of-body experiences may correspond with actual events.

· A higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.

· Widely used yet scientifically imprecise terms such as near-death and out-of-body experiences may not be sufficient to describe the actual experience of death. Future studies should focus on cardiac arrest, which is biologically synonymous with death, rather than ill-defined medical states sometimes referred to as ‘near-death’.

· The recalled experience surrounding death merits a genuine investigation without prejudice.’

 

Via New Yorker: ‘There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. There is one in Pinedale, Wyoming population 2,043, and one in Old Forge, New York population 756; Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania population 1,085, has three. Most are family operations, staffed by immigrants who pass through for a few months at a time, living in houses and apartments that have been converted into makeshift dormitories. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.’

Via The Daily Beast: ‘Antarctica is losing so much mass that it’s actually changing Earth’s gravity.

…The immediate consequence of the melting is the growing instability of ice shelves, places where the ice covering extends into the ocean. …As Antarctic ice melts, it shifts mass from the continent into the oceans, slightly changing Earth’s gravitational field in that part of the world…’

Via Washington Post: ‘While the international community has been accused of dragging its feet on the Ebola crisis, Cuba, a country of just 11 million people that still enjoys a fraught relationship with the United States, has emerged as a crucial provider of medical expertise in the West African nations hit by Ebola.

On Thursday, 165 health professionals from the country arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to join the fight against Ebola – the largest medical team of any single foreign nation, according to the World Health Organization WHO. And after being trained to deal with Ebola, a further 296 Cuban doctors and nurses will go to Liberia and Guinea, the other two countries worst hit by the crisis.’

Via Salon.com:  ‘If critics of income inequality are wondering why the growing gap between rich and poor hasn’t been a more potent political issue in the upcoming elections, a new study offers some answers: Americans grossly underestimate this inequality. That’s one of the key findings of a survey showing the gap between CEO and average worker pay in America is more than 10 times larger than the typical American perceives.’

I’m down with this. Via Vox:  ‘Benjamin Mazer is a third-year medical student at the University of Rochester. Last year, after becoming increasingly concerned with the public-health impact of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s sometimes pseudoscience health advice, he decided to ask state and national medical associations to do something about it.

“Dr. Oz has something like 4-million viewers a day,” Mazer told Vox. “The average physician doesnt see a million patients in their lifetime. Thats why organized medicine should be taking action.”

Last year, Mazer brought a policy before the Medical Society of the State of New York — where Dr. Oz is licensed — requesting that they consider regulating the advice of famous physicians in the media. His idea: Treat health advice on TV in the same vein as expert testimony, which already has established guidelines for truthfulness. In 2014, Mazer also launched a website to gather first-hand accounts from health professionals about their run-ins with Dr. Oz-based medicine on the front line. Its called “Doctors In Oz.”‘

Via Vox:  ‘Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.

Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.

Wild-eyed conspiracy theories are common on Facebook. You may naturally wonder, then, why you are reading about these ones. Partly its because Wolfs posts on ISIS deeply offended many people who knew one or more of the four murdered Westerners whom Wolf accused of being actors. And as American victims James Foley and Steven Sotloff were journalists, their outraged friends included a number of fellow journalists, so you may have seen them discussing Wolfs posts online and wondered what had happened.’

‘ISIS’ brutality did not emerge in a vacuum; rather, it is part of a whole ecology of cruelty spread out over more than a decade…’  — Alireza Doostdar,The University of Chicago Divinity School.

Via Collectors Weekly: ‘As a rock-poster collector, I’ve always found that handoff from artist to printer to be one of the most interesting aspects of the form. Many of the artists working between 1966 and 1971, talented though they were, did not know the first thing about offset lithography, the dominant printing technique of the day. In this light, the unsung heroes of San Francisco’s rock-poster scene may have been the printers. Sure Graham and Helms wrote the small checks, and the ideas belonged to the artists. But with a few notable exceptions Wilson had a small offset press, and Moscoso taught stone lithography, most poster artists of the era had no formal training in the printing techniques used to disseminate their work. As a result, career pressmen were often unsigned collaborators, teaching artists how to get the most out of a medium they absolutely had to understand if they were going to make it as poster artists.’

Via Salon.com: ‘The real promise of the MacArthur Fellowship program is that it does not require grant writing, or applications, or even achievement of a conventional sort. It could theoretically be used to bypass the world of foundation favorites altogether. It could single out worthy individuals who have been unfairly overlooked, lift them up, launch their careers, and force the world to pay attention. That even seems to have been one of the ideas for the program in the beginning.

Well, today the program rarely does any of those things. Instead, and just like nearly every other prize program in the world, it chooses noncontroversial figures and rewards the much-rewarded, giving in to what James English calls “the desire to have already famous and massively consecrated individuals on their list of winners.

”Sort through that list of winners and you’ll find lots of the usual prize magnets, the foundation favorites, the celebrated New Yorker authors, the “20 Under 40” set, the people you heard profiled on NPR a short while ago, the person who just got the National Book Award, or the John Bates Clark medal, or a Ford Foundation Leadership Grant. The résumés of certain winners are thick with honors: Junot Diaz was a literary champion many times over by the time he won in 2012, while Robert Penn Warren, who received one of the very first MacArthur Fellowships, had won the Pulitzer three times by that point in his life and had received more than a dozen honorary degrees.My point here is not that some particular Genius didn’t deserve the prize. Few of the MacArthur Fellows represent genuinely poor choices. But many are certainly unoriginal choices, choices that by definition do nothing to advance creativity or innovation, as they are given to people who already have tenure, or recognition, or funding.

This particular criticism of the Genius Grant has been around since the beginning, but instead of changing course and concentrating on the business of finding brilliant but obscure people, the Foundation seems to have persuaded itself that rewarding the amply rewarded isn’t really a problem at all…’

Via Salon.com: ‘The leading scholar indicts the president — and Black leadership and the media for not calling out his failures…’

Via Gizmodo: ‘If you want protection from privacy intrusions by private UAV pilots, dont go all Annie Oakley on your neighbors quadcopter like this guy; thats super illegal in most American cities. Instead, try these simple means of dissuasion. Youll definitely look like a bit of a loon, but thats just the price of freedom. And/or paranoia…’

First Weekend in America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons (via Gizmodo): ‘Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animations home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kids weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you wont find any animation on broadcast this morning….’

Via ANIMAL: ‘Everyone likes to get high. Whether from your morning cup of coffee, taking 2C-I to trip balls, or a surge of endocannabinoids after doing exercise, we love the feeling. This is rooted in a common chemistry that all creatures share.Scientists and cat toy makers have long known that animals too enjoy the fruits of our shared biology. They go for the chemical shortcut to fun times as much as we do. Here are just a few…’

Via Bloomberg: ‘Islamic State extremists have herded hundreds of women to be given to its fighters in Syria as a reward or sold as sex slaves and have summarily executed women in professions, according to the United Nations.’

Via The Atlantic: ‘This week surgeons at the University of Chicago found that the strength of a person’s ability to identify odors is an eerily excellent predictor of impending death. If and when your sense of smell fades, it seems, your risk of dying within the next five years is several times higher than that of your inviolate friends…’

Via New Statesman: ‘A growing community of scientists, philosophers and tech billionaires believe we need to start thinking seriously about the threat of human extinction…’

Via Substance.com: ‘Against all medical guidelines, children who are two and three years old are getting diagnosed with ADHD and treated with Adderall and other stimulants. It may be shocking, but its perfectly legal…’

Via The Atlantic: ‘Psychologists have found that we like stories more after theyve been “spoiled.” Why?’

Via The Guardian: ‘Species across land, rivers and seas decimated as humans kill for food in unsustainable numbers and destroy habitats…’

Via Pacific Standard: ‘An intriguing detail made its way into the middle of an Associated Press story this summer about a young Canadian man who converted to Islam, became radicalized, and ultimately died fighting in Syria. According to the piece, the youth, Damian Clairmont, “found religion at 17 after battling depression.” He was just one person, of course, but newly published research finds there may indeed be a link between depression and radicalization. It suggests that, in searching for ways to deter young Western Muslims from the path of jihad, officials may be overlooking an important mental-health component…’

Via io9: ‘This mornings eruption at Mount Ontake in Japan is the latest in a recent spate of volcanic blasts to have threatened lives and forced evacuations. The timing and global distribution of these recent eruptions raise an intriguing question: Is there such a thing as a season for volcanic eruptions?’

Not just ancient history (via Salon.com): ‘When Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, he said “our country has changed,” arguing that the circumstances that led to the initial formula for preclearance was no longer valid because the country had overcome much of its racial prejudice. But in the year immediately following the decision, many Southern conservatives have shown that many of the prejudices that prevented blacks from voting in the past are still manifesting themselves today through attempts to suppress the vote of minorities.’

Via Salon.com: ‘The presidents “latte salute” is just the latest manufactured scandal from the conservative media machine…’

Via Salon.com: ‘For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world. Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three. What does it mean? What emotions does it evoke? Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community? The differences may be subtle but they are important.If, one way or another, you’ve left religion behind, and if you’ve been unsure what to call yourself, you might try on one of these…’

Via Slate: ‘After Scotland, all eyes are turning to Catalonia, where voters will hold a non-binding vote on independence from Spain on Nov. 9. But maybe Americans need to focus closer to home. We already knew—courtesy of Slate’s David Weigel—that breakaway movements in the United States were feeling inspired by the Scotland independence referendum vote. But it turns out that wanting to break away from the union is not as much of a fringe idea as some might think. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, almost one-quarter of Americans said they either strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their states leaving the union.’

Via The Japan Times: ‘To date, Iran is the only country in the region actually fighting against Islamic State on both fronts, the one in Syria defending Bashar Assad’s government, which Iran has supported since the beginning of the uprising in Syria, and the other front in Iraq opposing the Sunni Islamic State. On the face of it, this suggests that a strategic alliance of Iran with the United States might benefit both.

In Washington last week, Sen. Rand Paul went on record as declaring on Buzzfeed that “If we were to get rid of Assad, it would be a jihadist wonderland in Syria.” He sees Syria and Iran as the “the two allies” who together would have the means, ability and motivation “to wipe out ISIS.”

But Barack Obama and John Kerry — and above all, both parties in the American Congress — are not interested.’

William Pfaff is an American journalist who focuses on foreign policy. His latest book is “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy”

Via Telegraph.UK: ‘The fabulously wealthy Gulf state, which owns an array of London landmarks and claims to be one of our best friends in the Middle East, is a prime sponsor of violent Islamists…’

Via NPR: ‘One is becoming as well-known for her autobiographical work as she is for her test for what movies meet a gender-balance baseline. Another directed one of the best-reviewed and most surreal documentaries of the past decade and has a follow-up on this year’s film-festival circuit. Another has been leading the fight for gay-marriage rights since 2004 in Massachusetts.

Alongside cartoonist Alison Bechdel, The Act of Killing director Joshua Oppenheimer and attorney Mary Bonauto, other 2014 MacArthur Award winners are exploring the subtleties of race via psychology and poetry, using math to model the human brain or define the limits of prime numbers, or providing physical, home and job security to some of the country’s most at-risk populations. Learn more about them below…’

Via IFLScience: ‘For over two decades, scientists have suspected a link between the Foxp2 gene and the development of speech and language in humans. Now, researchers show that introducing the human version of this gene into mice speeds up their learning. The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, could help explain the evolution of our unique ability to produce and understand speech — which may be the result of a gene mutation that arose more than half a million years ago.

Nicknamed the language gene, Foxp2 was first identified in a family with severe speech difficulties; they carried only one functional copy of the gene coding for transcription factor forkhead box P2. Since humans split from chimps, there’ve only been two key mutations in this gene, which makes you wonder: What would happen if chimps had our version of the gene?

For starters, a large international team led by MIT’s Ann Graybiel and Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology engineered mice to express “humanized” Foxp2 by introducing two human-specific amino acid changes into the gene. This change affected their striatum, a brain area essential for motor and cognitive behaviors in humans. Different parts of the striatum are responsible for two modes of learning: a conscious form called declarative learning and a non-conscious form called procedural learning.

The team placed the mice through a series of maze experiments. Mice with humanized Foxp2 performed the same as normal mice when just one type of memory was needed. But when both declarative and procedural forms of learning were engaged, mice with humanized Foxp2 learned “stimulus-response associations” much faster than regular mice. For example, knowing whether to turn left or right at a T-shaped junction — based on the texture of the maze floor and visible lab furniture — to earn a tasty treat.

Turns out, humanized Foxp2 gene makes it easier to transform new experiences and mindful actions into behavioral routine procedures. The engineered mice learned the route within a week, while regular mice did it in 11…’

Via io9: ‘New research published in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that schizophrenia is not a single disease, but rather a group of eight genetically distinct disorders, each of them with its own set of symptoms. The finding could result in improved diagnosis and treatment, while also shedding light on how genes work together to cause complex disorders.

…Complex diseases like schizophrenia may be influenced by hundreds or thousands of genetic variants that interact with one another in complicated and dynamic ways, leading to what scientists call “multifaceted genetic architectures.” Now, thanks to the work of investigators at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the genetic architecture for schizophrenia is starting to take shape.

…So, for example, hallucinations and delusions were associated with one set of DNA variations, that carried a 95% risk of schizophrenia. Another symptom, disorganized speech and behavior, was found to carry a 100% risk with another set of DNA.

…When it comes to schizophrenia and other complex conditions, individual genes have only a weak and inconsistent association (which is why it’s often silly to look for single-gene factors). But groups of interacting gene clusters create an extremely high and consistent risk of illness — in this case, on the order of 70% to 100%. It’s nearly impossible for people with these precise genetic variations to avoid the condition. In all, the researchers found no less than 42 clusters of genetic variations that significantly increase the risk of schizophrenia. “…What was missing was the idea that these genes don’t act independently. They work in concert to disrupt the brain’s structure and function, and that results in the illness.” ‘

As a clinical psychiatrist focusing on patients with this condition, this is a confirmation of my certainty about the heterogeneity of schizophrenia. When you try to do research on characteristics, causes, or treatment approaches to a diverse group of people sharing little beyond a diagnosis, it is no wonder that no strong conclusions emerge.

Via Pacific Standard: ‘Newly published research… finds that, to a relatively small but observable degree, people are attracted to the body odor of others who share their political ideology.That’s right: To some extent, we emit red smells or blue smells, and consciously or not, potential mates can and do notice the difference.’

Via 3quarksdaily: ‘Wine tasting has become one of the favorite playthings of the media with articles appearing periodically detailing a new study that allegedly shows wine tasters to be incompetent charlatans, arrogantly foisting their fantasies on an unsuspecting public. But these articles seldom reflect critically on their conclusions or address the question of what genuine expertise in wine tasting looks like. In fact, articles in this genre routinely misinterpret the results of these studies and seem more interested in reinforcing partly undeserved stereotypes of snobbish sommeliers…

What is puzzling about this whole debate about the objectivity of wine critics, however, is why people want objective descriptions of wine. We don’t expect scientific objectivity from art critics, literary critics, or film reviewers. The disagreements among experts in these fields are as deep as the disagreements about wine. There is no reason to think a film critic would have the same judgment about a film if viewed in a different context, in comparison with a different set of films, or after conversing about the film with other experts. Our judgments are fluid and they should be if we are to make sense of our experience. When listening to music aren’t we differently affected by a song depending upon whether we are at home, in a bar, going to the beach, listening with friends or alone? Why would wine be different? The judgment of any critic is simply a snapshot at a particular time and place of an object whose meaning can vary with context. Wine criticism cannot escape this limitation…’

Via Public Radio International: ‘Once upon a time in America, marriage was the norm for adults. But now, for the first time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking these numbers in 1976, there are more single Americans than people who are married.’

Via Psych News Alert: ‘The results, published in BMJ, showed that past use of benzodiazepines for three months or more was associated with an increased risk—up to 51%—for AD. The association increased even more with longer exposure to the anxiolytic. In addition, the use of long-acting forms of benzodiazepines increased risk for AD by 19 percent more than that of the short-acting. Results were sustained after adjusting for anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders.“Benzodiazepines are known to be associated with an increased risk of worsening cognition…even in cognitively normal elderly subjects,” said Davangere Devanand, M.D., director of the geriatric psychiatry program at Columbia University, in an interview with Psychiatric News…’

The researchers, and the reaction to the study, focused on the potential pharmacological basis for the finding. But I have a different thought. There is substantial evidence that maintaining mental agility and stimulation can ward off the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. But chronic anxiolytic medication users are generally chronically anxious and risk-averse, thus probably less prone to continue to challenge themselves mentally.

Via NYTimes.com: ‘Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. “The book that changed my life” is usually taken to mean “for the better.” This week, Leslie Jamison and Francine Prose discuss whether a book can ever transform a reader’s life for the worse.’

Via Boing Boing: ‘Slain journalist James Foley’s mom says federal officials threatened the Foley family with criminal charges if they raised money to pay ransom to free him. The “devastating” message didn’t surprise her, she told ABC News, but the way it was delivered shocked her.“I was surprised there was so little compassion,” Diane Foley told ABC News today of the three separate warnings she said U.S. officials gave the family about the illegality of paying ransom to the terror group ISIS.’

Via Mind Hacks: ‘Journalism site The Toast has what I believe is the only first-person account of Cotard’s delusion – the belief that you’re dead – which can occur in psychosis.The article is by writer Esmé Weijun Wang who describes her own episode of psychosis and how she came to believe, and later unbelieve, that she was dead. It’s an incredibly evocative piece and historically, worth remembering.’  — Vaughan Bell

Via The Atlantic:  ‘One professor left his home for a 36-square-foot open-air box, and he is happier for it. How much does a person really need?’

Via The Atlantic:  ‘Barack Obama delivered a bewildering speech on Wednesday. The pledge to “destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria; the deployment of U.S. troops to do just that; the flag-flanked, sober-sounding president addressing the American people behind a podium in prime-time—all appeared to amount to a declaration of war. But Obama never used the word “war” to describe his decision to launch airstrikes against ISIS and provide military assistance to regional forces fighting the extremist group. When he employed the w-word, it was to clarify what this is not. Its not “another ground war in Iraq.” Its not Afghanistan. Its a “counterterrorism campaign” to “take out ISIL wherever they exist.” Obama didn’t say how long the campaign would take, or how well know when its mission is accomplished.’

Via Salon.com:  ‘“The animal we are resurrecting today is so bizarre, it is going to force dinosaur experts to rethink many things they thought they knew about dinosaurs. So far, Spinosaurus is the only dinosaur that shows these adaptations.”’

Via Nautilus:  ‘Knowledge about aliens might be as dangerous as the aliens themselves.’

Via WIRED:  ‘First thing I did was call Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at SETI. He laughed and said, “You’re certainly not obligated to report it: Theres no law, theres no policy. Nobody forces you to report that any more than you’re forced to report a sighting of a ghost or a leprechaun. But if you don’t tell anybody else, its just your story. And if nobody can verify what you saw, its not that meaningful … So if you didn’t tell, it wouldn’t do much good. And if you did tell someone, it usually doesn’t do much good anyway because theres usually very thin evidence.” I took this to mean that as far as he’s concerned, it doesn’t matter what you do—because you probably didn’t see anything anyway. To me, this is an argument for keeping it to yourself: Its probably nothing.

But then I called Mufon, the Mutual UFO Network, an organization that compiles and investigates these claims. You say it this way: “Moo-FAWN.” Mufon’s communications director, Roger Marsh, was adamant: Yes, you should report it. Mufon needs you to report it. “Its hard to study UFOs,” he said. Mufon is trying to make a rigorous scientific study of extraterrestrial sightings, but their sample size is inevitably very small; they need more people to come forward out of the darkness. And the more people who do, the less ridiculed they’ll be—the less lonely they’ll feel. And the easier it will be for the next person. This is a pretty good argument for reporting what you saw: It just might be something.

But no one thinks of these encounters from the aliens point of view—the risk that creature took, to fly beyond its frontiers and reveal itself to you. Maybe it took you aboard for a quick surgical analysis. And for what? When it returns and reports to the monarchs or venture capitalists that bankrolled its voyage, what sort of deliverables will it have to impress them? Maybe mass hysteria on our part is the only way to make alien investors feel they’re getting their moneys worth.Which is to say, maybe—just maybe—reporting an alien visitation actually encourages more alien encounters. Anyway, those are the facts, as best I can puzzle them out. I lean toward reporting. But now, at least, you can make an informed decision.’

Via io9:  ‘If unconventional therapies like acupuncture can make patients feel better by bringing them a vague sense of well being, why not let them? Some scientists say we shouldn’t.’

The referendum is finally here, next Thursday, Sept. 18th. As a lover of Scotland, I have closely followed the issue. James Fallow, via The Atlantic, writes:  

‘As advertised, I don’t plan to host an open-ended forum on the merits of the Scottish independence vote. If you’d like to see the Scottish government’s white paper supporting a Yes vote, go here. If you’ve missed Paul Krugman’s economic argument against it “Spain without the sunshine”, it’s here. If you’d like to know what the term “devo max” means, you can go here. Essentially, it’s much-increased Scottish autonomy within the U.K. If you’d like an apparently serious sky-is-falling argument that the Russians will invade Scotland if it votes Yes, you can find it here. But to round out the arguments, in one omnibus update, here are reader messages from four distinct perspectives.’

Via The Washington Post:  ‘A foundation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education is exceptional at making us more efficient or increasing speed all within set processes, but it’s not so good at growing our curiosity or imagination. Its focus is poor at sparking our creativity. It doesn’t teach us empathy or what it means to relate to others on a deep emotional level. Singapore and Japan are two great examples. “[They] are looked to as exemplar STEM nations, but as nations they suffer the ability to be perceived as creative on a global scale.” [one critic] said.

Is the United States completely misinformed and heading down the wrong track? Not entirely. Science, technology, engineering and math are great things to teach and focus on, but they can’t do the job alone. In order to prepare our students to lead the world in innovation, we need to focus on the creative thought that gives individuals that innovative edge.

To learn where that edge comes from, Michigan State University observed a group of its honors college graduates from 1990 to 1995 who majored in the STEM fields. Their research uncovered that of those students, the ones who owned businesses or filed patents had eight times the exposure to the arts as children than the general public. The researchers concluded that these results are important to note in our rebuilding of the U.S. economy. “Inventors are more likely to create high-growth, high-paying jobs in our state and that’s the kind of target we think we should be looking for”…’

Via Big Think:  ‘Mindfulness is a trendy catch word, one numerous life coaches take advantage of. Genevieve Smith writes in Harpers that there are now roughly 50,000 life coaches in America. While some are trained therapists and psychologists who added the term to their business card to take advantage of a trend, many are not trained at all. When uncertified coaches encounter clients experiencing profound emotional distress or serious existential crises, they are not equipped to properly treat them. The road of mindfulness has never been about feeling good all the time. Experiencing the depths of despair and anger might very well be encountered along the way.’

Via Salon.com:  ‘He doesn’t think executing an innocent man matters. How on earth can such a depraved human be on our Supreme Court?’ — Heather Digby Parton

Via Salon.com:  ‘The physicist warned that under high energy levels, the Higgs boson could collapse space and time…’

Via Salon.com:  ‘Traditional methods for fighting global warming have proven fruitless. Why civil disobedience could be our last, best hope.’

Via Maps on the Web:  ‘America’s 50 Healthiest Counties for Kids represents a national, county-level assessment of how health and environmental factors affect the well-being of children younger than 18. It highlights counties that feature, among other child-friendly data, fewer infant deaths, fewer low birth weight babies, fewer deaths from injuries, fewer teen births and fewer children in poverty.’

Via Brain Pickings: ‘In 1552, a curious and lavishly illustrated manuscript titled Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs appeared in the Swabian Imperial Free City of Augsburg, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire, located in present-day Germany. It exorcised, in remarkable detail and wildly imaginative artwork, Medieval Europe’s growing obsession with signs sent from “God” — a testament to the basic human propensity for magical thinking, with which we often explain feelings and phenomena beyond the grasp of our logic. This unusual Roman manuscript was recently discovered and published for the first time as The Book of Miracles (public library) — a sumptuous box-sized trilingual tome in English, French, and German, produced in Taschen‘s typical fashion of pleasurable aesthetic bombast. Somewhere between Salvador Dalí’s illustrations of Montaigne, the weird and wonderful Codex Seraphinianus, and the visual history of Gotham’s imaginary apocalypse, the book is a singular shrine to some of the most eternal of human hopes and fears, and, above all, our immutable longing for grace, for mercy, for the miraculous.’

Via Time:  ‘The morning I woke up with Ebola, I felt a little warm. My temperature was 100.0–higher than normal, but not too concerning. … I thought I just had a cold, but I was not naive enough to think I was immune to the possibility of Ebola.’

Via Deadspin:  ‘This foul beast was plucked from the depths by a fisherman named Steve Bargeron, who then sent pictures to the The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission… It appears that this monster is something called a mantis shrimp, and a cursory Google search reveals that mantis shrimps are badass. Here, watch one punch this shit out of a dumb crab and then stab a fish head right through the eye…’

Via Dazed:  ‘After his biggest success, he suffered a huge flop and ditched acting for four years to study philosophy in Paris…’

Via The Daily Beast:  ‘Some 200 preteen and teenage girls in a Colombian village have suddenly developed symptoms, including nausea, dizziness and fatigue, without clear explanation. The rapidity of onset has raised concerns that there might be an infection going through the town or—more sinister—that it could be a reaction to a vaccine introduced to prevent human papilloma virus HPV.

Likely it is neither. In fact, the exact story has played out previously in another town—Le Roy, New York, in 2012—with the same age group and sex of the affected all girls but one, and the same vaccine just introduced. There was a call from anti-vaccine enthusiasts and others to halt the vaccine ASAP until the inconvenient fact came out that, though the vaccine was indeed being given in the town, many of the teens with the symptoms had not received it. Ah, well.

Rather than a strict medical cause, many have labeled the Le Roy problem and the current Colombia illnesses as “mass hysteria” or a “mass psychogenic illness” MPI. This diagnosis occupies a uniquely dark and uncomfortable corner of medicine. The concept of mass hysteria is rather chilling to consider. It is particularly awkward given the demographic: Almost every example is that of young girls who develop a cluster of near-identical symptoms. And, after much sturm und drang, all are diagnosed as nuts though with gentler, more clinical terms by older men who, let’s face it, are not without their own issues. ‘

Via Modern Farmer:  ‘Visit the remote mountainside towns in Turkey’s Black Sea region during springtime and you may witness beekeepers hauling their hives upslope, until they reach vast fields of cream and magenta rhododendron flowers. Here, they unleash their bees, which pollinate the blossoms and make a kind of honey from them so potent, it’s been used as a weapon of war.

The dark, reddish, “mad honey,” known as deli bal in Turkey, contains an ingredient from rhododendron nectar called grayanotoxin — a natural neurotoxin that, even in small quantities, brings on light-headedness and sometimes, hallucinations. In the 1700s, the Black Sea region traded this potent produce with Europe, where the honey was infused with drinks to give boozers a greater high than alcohol could deliver.

When over-imbibed, however, the honey can cause low blood pressure and irregularities in the heartbeat that bring on nausea, numbness, blurred vision, fainting, potent hallucinations, seizures, and even death, in rare cases. Nowadays, cases of mad honey poisoning crop up every few years—oftentimes in travelers who have visited Turkey.’ (thanks to Boing Boing)

Via smh.com.au:  ‘A new species of gigantic dinosaur that weighed more than 59 tonnes and stretched 26 metres from head to tail has been unearthed in an Argentinian desert. And the giant plant eater, named Dreadnoughtus schrani, had not finished growing when it died between 83 million and 66 million years ago. “Dreadnoughtus schrani was astoundingly huge,” said palaeontologist Kenneth Lacovara, who discovered the fossil skeleton in southern Patagonia and led the excavation and analysis.’

Via Pacific Standard:  ‘When Hurricane Katrina broke the levees of New Orleans and flooded 85 percent of the city, 100,000 people were left homeless. Disproportionately, these were the poor and black residents of New Orleans. This same population faced more hurdles to returning than their wealthier and whiter counterparts thanks to the effects of poverty, but also choices made by policymakers and politicians—some would say made deliberately—that reduced the black population of the city.

With them went many of the practitioners of voodoo, a faith with its origins in the merging of West African belief systems and Catholicism. At Newsweek, Stacey Anderson writes that locals claim that the voodoo community was 2,500 to 3,000 people strong before Katrina, but after that number was reduced to around 300.’

 

Via IFLScience: ‘Tapping directly into someone’s brain in order to share thoughts isn’t just for Spock anymore. An international team of researchers were able to replicate the Vulcan Mind Meld by creating a device that allows two people to share information through thought. The researchers tested the technology by separating the users over 8,000 km 5,000 mi apart—with one user in France and the other in India. The paper has been published in PLOS ONE.’

Via IFLScience: ‘When these types of animals occur out in the wild, they tend not to live very long. With two brains governing one body, movement isn’t always smooth and deliberate. Instead, they can disagree about how to move, making it fairly difficult to catch prey. This anomalous anatomy also makes them fairly easy prey for larger predators as well. However, two-headed snakes receiving proper captive care are able to live full, relatively normal lives and even give birth to normal offspring.’

Via IFLScience: ‘Where in the universe is the Milky Way?

Galaxies like ours huddle in clusters, and large-scale systems of galaxies, called superclusters, have vague boundaries that are difficult to define especially from the inside: They’re all drawn to each other and interconnected in a web of filaments.

Now for the first time, astronomers have constructed a map of the local universe. They’ve named our home supercluster Laniakea, Hawaiian for “immeasurable heaven.” The work was published in Nature this week.

By examining the motions of galaxies, a team of cosmic map makers led by R. Brent Tully from the University of Hawaii charted the distribution of matter in the universe to identify superclusters. A galaxy stuck between two superclusters will be caught in a gravitational tug-of-war. The balance of these forces determines the galaxy’s motion, and measuring the velocity helps define the region of space where each supercluster dominates. With a catalog of 8,000 galaxies velocities, the team built a galactic distribution map and located the pVia ints where cosmic flows — along which: ‘galaxies travel — diverge.

The Laniakea supercluster, they found, is 520 million light-years in diameter and contains the mass of 100 million billion suns within 100,000 galaxies. Its name pays tribute to Polynesian navigators who used knowledge of the heavens to voyage across the Pacific Ocean.’

Via Gizmodo: ‘According to the Youtube description, this video—published yesterday in Reddit but shot last year—captures the moment when a tornado violently hits a village in Bashkiria, Russia. The hair-raising footage was taken from a cars dash cam that stayed on even when the tornado was passing right over it.’

Via New York Times: ‘No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience, that no new media could begin to rival. (It’s no coincidence that it was the makers of “The Matrix” who brought his previous epic, “Cloud Atlas,” to the screen, in 2012, with limited success.) Mitchell sees the everyday with the startled freshness of a creature newly arrived from Epsilon Eridani, but amid all the glorious physical description — “The wood sounds like waves, with rooks tumbling about like black socks in a dryer” — there’s always a trace of something metaphysical that lifts the roof off the contemporary novel and suggests there are many more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies. You may not believe in telepathy, second sight or reincarnation, but if you enter Mitchell’s universe you can’t not believe in them either.’

Via Big Think:  ‘In a field in Illinois sits a shed. In that shed sits a machine that is gathering data to determine whether the universe is a hologram. Created by physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, a machine called the Holometer will determine if the universe is merely a series of bits, similar to how newspaper photos are composed of colored dots, or if a more substantial material reality exists…’

Via Science Alert: ‘Human trials of the surprisingly simple vaccine are now planned. If successful, it could be taken as a probiotic-like drink.’

Via Jezebel: ‘The next time you are at your yoga class and the instructor asks you to take a moment to clear your mind for some peaceful meditation, instead of focusing on that tabletop water fountain she bought at Ross, I want you to think about this cat with a tiny frog on its head.’

Via io9: ‘As the number of patients who receive opioid prescriptions to treat non-cancer pain has increased in the past decade, so too have the number of overdoses. A new study, however, finds that states that legalized medical marijuana between 1999 and 2010 had 25% fewer annual overdose deaths than the rest of the U.S.

More specifically, the research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine, found that overdose deaths from opioids decreased by an average of 20% one year after the laws implementation, 25% by two years, and up to 33% by years five and six.

The study comes at a time when the CDC has warned that opioid overdoses are “skyrocketing.” Since 1999, deaths from prescription painkillers have increased 400% among women and 265% among men…‘

Via National Geographic: ‘Climate and ocean changes blamed for huge losses of puffins, kittiwakes, and terns.’

via Futility Closet: ‘Eugene Graves and William Brown patented this grim game in 1902. A row of effigies stand on blocks under a gibbet. Each effigy is fitted with a noose, and the players take turns shooting balls at the blocks, “representing summary punishment meted out to the victim.”

In the patent abstract, the effigies are described only as “notorious criminals and persons opposed to law and order”; Graves and Brown note that these can be varied to suit the “location, place or country for which the game is especially designed.”

“A flag may be provided for each figure to designate the character or nationality of the effigy.” We’re lucky this didn’t catch on.’

Via WIRED: ‘Though galaxies look larger than atoms and elephants appear to outweigh ants, some physicists have begun to suspect that size differences are illusory. Perhaps the fundamental description of the universe does not include the concepts of “mass” and “length,” implying that at its core, nature lacks a sense of scale.

This little-explored idea, known as scale symmetry, constitutes a radical departure from long-standing assumptions about how elementary particles acquire their properties. But it has recently emerged as a common theme of numerous talks and papers by respected particle physicists. With their field stuck at a nasty impasse, the researchers have returned to the master equations that describe the known particles and their interactions, and are asking: What happens when you erase the terms in the equations having to do with mass and length?’

Via New Scientist: ‘In some countries, the long rise in IQ scores has come to a halt, and there are even signs of a decline. The reason, according to a few researchers, is that improving social conditions have obscured an underlying decline in our genetic potential. Perhaps we are evolving to be stupid after all.’

Via Salon.com: ‘‘According to a recent report by Marijuana.com, sniffing black peppercorns could be the simple answer to reducing the paranoia effects sometimes felt after smoking pot. By simply smelling or chewing on peppercorns after lighting up, smokers can mitigate these effects, writes Jay Arthur.

Owen Smith writes in Canada’s Cannabis Digest that while at Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club, he witnessed the impact pepper had on pot. “Most patients who have tried this simply took a few sniffs of the black pepper to receive an almost immediate effect,” he wrote. “Others have reported that after chewing on pepper corns they felt relief within an hour, but that may be a delay most would seek to avoid.”

Why would this work? In a scientific review published by the British Journal of Pharmacology, author Ethan Russo writes of a “phytocannabinoid-terpenoid entourage effect” that can help with “pain, inflammation, depression, anxiety, addiction, epilepsy, cancer, fungal and bacterial infections.” ‘

Via National Geographic: ‘We seem indifferent to the mass extinction were causing, yet we lose a part of ourselves when another animal dies out.’

Via National Geographic: ‘A new approach, similar to one previously tested on Ebola, saved monkeys up to three days after infection with Marburg virus.’

Via io9: ‘Sportfishers off the coast of Bonita Springs Florida captured the footage earlier this month. The shark caught on the line is a blacktip shark, the big fella an appropriately named goliath grouper.’

Via WIRED: ‘Something about city life appears to be causing spiders to grow larger than their rural counterparts. And if that’s not enough to give you nightmares, these bigger urban spiders are also multiplying faster.

A new study published today in PLOS One shows that golden orb weaver spiders living near heavily urbanized areas in Sydney, Australia tend to be bigger, better fed, and have more babies than those living in places less touched by human hands.’

Via Salon.com: ‘Imagine a world where a filmmaker could go to a studio and say, “My team has five million followers. Through crowd-funding, we’ve done 25,000 preorders for the video that we haven’t begun to shoot, and I want to be your partner in the producing and marketing of this movie.” How could that not be enticing? And we’re almost at that point. This is the beginning of the third way. And you can already see it peeking out from under the horizon. Each day, it grows larger, better, and, perhaps for some, more threatening.’

Via Big Think: ‘Thanks to advantages in facial recognition technology and natural language analysis, virtual therapists can “understand” humans better than ever before. Developed by the Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles, one virtual therapist named Ellie can measure your smile whether its ironic or sincere, spot a nervous tic, and determine the meaning of your tone of voice and your posture. She will also analyze speech patterns to determine how forthcoming you are about your true thoughts and feelings.

Were humans always willing to level with their professional caretakers about their psychological state, there might not be a need for virtual therapists. Those most in need of therapy, however, such as soldiers returning home from war, are also the most likely to avoid it. But when therapy is virtual, people are more likely to divulge information that can be useful in developing treatment. In a experiment of 239 individuals who were given sessions with virtual counselor Ellie, those were told the truth that Ellie was a computer expressed more personal information than those told a human was controlling what Ellie said.’

Via ThinkProgress: ‘In 1977, a Texas man named Jerry Hartfield was convicted of murder. His conviction was tossed out three years later because the process used to select his jury was unconstitutional. Yet Hartfield was neither freed from prison nor given a new trial. Last April, a Texas trial judge held that he must remain in prison, despite the fact that the sole legal basis for his detention was overturned nearly 34 years ago, because Hartfield did not actively seek a new trial. Hartfield is intellectually disabled. His IQ is estimated to be only 51. On Thursday, Hartfield’s case grew even more similar to a Franz Kafka novel with a Texas Court of Appeals decision refusing to grant him relief.’

Via Aeon: ‘A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy…’

Via BlackGirlDangerous: ‘A Black person is murdered by cops, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes every 28 hours in the U.S. The killing of an unarmed Black teenager named Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO, which has resulted in protests in that town and harsh police push-back and brutality against even more of its citizens, and which, via social media, has gotten the attention of people around the world, probably isn’t even the latest occurrence, at just three days old.

Talking to people on Twitter about Mike Brown and what’s happening in Ferguson right now, I’ve noticed again how easily folks get distracted when Black people are murdered by the police. It seems as though every detail is more interesting, more important, more significant—including looting of a Walmart in Ferguson, which a local Fox news station focused its entire coverage on—than the actual life that was taken by police.

So, to get folks back on track to focus on what matters most here—the killing of yet another unarmed Black teenager—I’ve compiled this list of 6 Things To Stop Being Distracted By When A Black Person Gets Murdered By the Police.’

Via The Atlantic: ‘The Sunni militants who now threaten to take over Iraq seemed to spring from nowhere when they stormed Mosul in early June. But the group that recently renamed itself simply “the Islamic State” has existed under various names and in various shapes since the early 1990s. And its story is the story of how modern terrorism has evolved, from a political and religious ideal into a death cult.’

Via Salon.com: ‘It would appear that Texas gun owners want to expand their rights yet again. And you won’t believe what new right their creator endowed them with this time: the right to sell alcohol at gun shows. What could go wrong?’

Via Boing Boing: ‘ “Im sure most of you have heard the story of the man who, desperately ill, goes to an analyst and tells the doctor that he has lost his desire to live and that he is seriously considering suicide. The doctor listens to this tale of melancholia and then tells the patient that what he needs is a good belly laugh. He advises the unhappy man to go to the circus that night and spend the evening laughing at Grock, the worlds funniest clown. The doctor sums it up, After you have seen Grock, I am sure you will be much happier. The patient rises to his feet, looks sadly at the doctor, turns and ambles to the door. As he starts to leave, the doctor says, By the way what is your name? The man turns and regards the analyst with sorrowful eyes. I am Grock.” ‘

Via Gizmodo: ‘Alfred Hitchcock appeared briefly in the majority of his movies, making that his signature. Morgan T. Rhys edited all those cameos together in a video so all Hitchcocks fans can enjoy it. His cameos became so popular that Hitchcock decided to make his appearances more obvious and earlier in the film, so people wouldn’t get distracted from the movie trying to spot him.’

Via The Wire: ‘Jay Chapman is the creator of the most commonly used lethal injection protocol, which he concocted in the late 1970s. This lethal recipe was adopted by 37 states. Chapman’s protocol called for three drugs: sodium thiopental, a sedative; pancuronium bromide, a paralytic agent; and to stop the heart, potassium chloride. However, in the last few years, manufacturers have pulled away from selling these drugs to states for the purpose of lethal injection. Sodium thiopental, the key sedative in the protocol, has become virtually unavailable. The last manufacturer of sodium thiopental in the United States stopped producing it in 2011. The European Union banned export of it all together, and India has banned its sale. While some states attempted to stockpile the drug before the bans, sodium thiopental has a shelf life of only four years, with expirations fast approaching in 2015.

Suddenly, states were left with prisoners on death row, and no way to kill them. They had to reinvent the lethal injection. On July 23, convicted murdered Joseph Wood was executed by the state of Arizona. His execution took almost two hours, involving fifteen doses of an experimental drug combination. Witnesses watched as he gagged and choked for the majority of the two hours, his opioid receptors filling with hydromorphone and midazolam.

An …official told the judge working to find an acceptable lethal injection protocol that “You’re not entitled to a pain-free execution.” This mentality is a point of contention on both sides of the execution battle. While some believe a painful execution qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment, others believe that with murderers who are guilty of terrible crimes against humanity, the end is more important than the means.’ 

 

Via io9s: ‘The midshipman fish has, all things considered, one of the more pleasant mating rituals in nature. Rather than fighting among themselves or biting the hell out of their prospective mates – as sharks do – they try to out-sing each other. The males get together in groups and start a low humming sound. He who hums best gets the girl.The group of fish humming together gets the attention of the local townspeople. Low-frequency humming carries over large distances, traveling through the ground, penetrating walls, and rattling windows. This is why we hear the bass when cars playing loud music come by the house, rather than the higher notes. It’s also why people close to the ocean hear a humming at night loud enough to keep them up. Just as a bonus, the fish are nocturnal. These people did not know where the humming was coming from, which is why power lines and local highways got a lot of complaints until someone turned their eyes on the ocean.’

Via Salon.com: ‘One of the last things Brown said, according to a witness: “I don’t have a gun! Stop shooting!” ‘

 

Via WIRED: ‘I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked—even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment. I wasn’t sure how long I’d keep it up (48 hours was all I could stand) or what I’d learn (possibly nothing.)…

My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post. As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were in order: Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi’s ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.

Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking “Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza,” as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I’m offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed.’ (Thanks, RK)

Via Salon.com: ‘ “We are living in the most peaceful century in human history; however the 2014 Global Peace Index shows that the last seven years has shown a notable deterioration in levels of peace.”So begins this year’s peace index, an annual report released by the nonprofit Institute for Economics and Peace. The study ranks 162 countries covering 99.6% of the world’s population according to a complex set of indicators that gauge the absence of violence and political instability. These include a nation’s level of military expenditure, its relations with neighboring countries and the percentage of the population held in prisons.’

Via Salon.com: ‘The people of Ferguson are angry. Outraged. The officer’s story is dubious. Any black kid with sense knows it is futile to reach into an officer’s vehicle and take his gun.  That story is only plausible to people who believe that black people are animals, that black men go looking for cops to pick fights with. Absurdity. Eyewitness accounts like these make far more sense.

It seems far easier to focus on the few looters who have reacted unproductively to this tragedy than to focus on the killing of Michael Brown. Perhaps looting seems like a thing we can control. I refuse. I refuse to condemn the folks engaged in these acts, because I respect black rage. I respect black people’s right to cry out, shout and be mad as hell that another one of our kids is dead at the hands of the police. Moreover I refuse the lie that the opportunism of a few in any way justifies or excuses the murderous opportunism undertaken by this as yet anonymous officer.’ — Brittney Cooper, Rutgers

Via Boing Boing: ‘The “suicide contagion” is a real phenomenon, says the CDC. Heres how journalists, bloggers, and public officials can help avoid spreading it.’

Via The Atlantic: ‘Is there a gun in your home? If so, is it secure? A Florida law now prevents physicians from discussing firearm safety with patients.’