‘The man sitting in front of me is a mass murderer. He is a serial rapist and a torturer. We are chatting about the weather, his family, his childhood. We are sharing drinks and exchanging gifts. The man is in his 80s now, frail and harmless, even charming. Instinctively I like him. It is hard for me to connect him to the monster he was so many decades ago. I think it must be hard for him, too.

…By representing atrocity, are we giving voice, and therefore respect, to the victims who have been silenced? Or are we sensationalizing the private stories of those who have already been violated? When we take evil that is beyond understanding and put it into words, are we bringing healing clarity to the raw confusion of trauma? Or are we falsely packaging and simplifying something that ought never to be reduced, translating inexpressible evil into something common just for the sake of sharing a story?…’ — James Dawes (The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Do you live in the same country as these folks?

‘…[T]ransportation workers were recently getting ready to install a new exit sign on a freeway, and someone realized the word “Florida” was spelled wrong, according to a report on FirstCoastNews.com.The spelling error was printed on the exit sign on Interstate 95 not only once — but twice — the website reported.’ (The Raw Story).

‘Happy birthday, Higgs boson! A year ago today, the discovery of the particle credited with giving others mass was announced to a packed and jubilant auditorium at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The moment marked the end of a 50-year hunt. But although the boson has been found, there is still plenty we do not know about the celebrated particle. Here are the most interesting unknowns that surround the Higgs boson.’ (New Scientist).

 

Tom Stafford: “I’m giving at talk at the Edinburgh festival on August 9th, called The Connected Brain. It will be at Summerhall (Fringe Venue 26 during the festival), cost £3, and here is the blurb:

Headlines often ask if facebook is making us shallow, or google eroding our memories. In this talk we will look “under the hood” of research on how digital technology is affecting us. We will try and chart a course between moral panic and techno-utopianism to reveal the real risks of technology and show how we can cement the great opportunities that it presents for the human mind.

The talk will be similar to the one I did in London recently at the School of Life. Ben Martynoga wrote up some details of that talk, which you can find here. The ideas in the talk involve using some examples from the Mind Hacks book to illustrate some principles of how the mind works, looking at the extended mind hypothesis and reminding ourselves of some of the history of moral panics around information technologies, which Vaughan has written so engagingly and often about (thanks Vaughan!). The place I get to, which is where I’m at with my thinking and where I hope to start a discussion with the audience, is that, rather than panic about technology making us dumb, distracted and alone, we need to identify the principles which will help us design technology which makes use smart, able to concentrate and empathetic.” (Mind Hacks).

The internet is all about the free flow of ideas, right? Collaboration! Discourse! Sharing! The day to day reality of what we do online may not always be quite so idealistic and ideologically motivated, but the open underpinnings are there. Except, of course, when theyre not at all. This visualization, published by Sebastian Sadowski, uses Googles transparency data to visualize all the things the company has been asked to censor.The governments of many countries routinely ask Google to suppress content across sites like Google Search and YouTube. Reasons range from national security, to suicide promotion, and government criticism. There are also categories for “other” and “reason unspecified.” Its interesting to see which countries are better or worse than you thought they would be. And check out that little chunk of mint green “reason unspecified” censorship on the U.S. chart. (Gizmodo).

“I got this post idea from data visualization expert John Nelson, who posted on his blog the direction in which tornadoes have traveled over the last 63 years. From the data, he discovered that a majority of the tornadoes moved in a northeastern direction, with a handful of them moving east. Knowing this, you have an advantage as far as what direction a tornado will go if you get caught up in the midst of one, and you can drive in a different direction away from the tornado to avoid it.” (Hackerspace).

World War Z … threw a lot of walking-dead heritage under the bus, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have a place in the ongoing evolution of zombie lore. It’s simply taking the idea of zombies as a surrogate for social anxieties in a new direction — in this case predominantly xenophobia and fears of viral outbreaks. This continues a long and distinguished history of zombie themes standing in for au courant topics like slave rebellion, communism, über-capitalism, technophobia, and globalization. However, how zombie tales—and their fans—deal with these issues has proven as problematic as, well, the problems themselves. Like, for example, the production of zombie ex-girlfriend shooting targets. (Underwire | Wired.com).

According to a new paper, mass shootings such as Sandy Hook and Aurora may be the result of Autism plus psychosis: A ‘one-two punch’ risk for tragic violence?

The first thing to note about this paper is that it’s in Medical Hypotheses.

I don’t normally take seriously anything that appears in this rather unique journal. This paper is, however, co-authored by Edward Shorter, an eminent historian of psychiatry; his book about it was a big influence on me. So it deserves a fair hearing.

The authors set the scene:

In the recent series of mass murders in Connecticut, Colorado, Norway and elsewhere, a pattern seems to be emerging: young men whose social isolation is so extreme as to verge on autism apparently become prey to psychotic ideation. And under the influence of this ideation they wreak terrible violence.

…What is actually the matter with these young men and how should we as a society conceive their pathology?

The answer, we’re told, is a combination of autism, and psychosis. Autism is not associated with violence per se, but psychosis is – and rates of psychosis are higher in autistics. What’s worse, in such cases, psychotic symptoms may go undiagnosed and untreated because they’re written off as just part of the autism.

(Neuroskeptic).

“According to the Dayton Daily News, State Senator Nina Turner introduced SB 307, which requires men to visit a sex therapist, undergo a cardiac stress test, and get their sexual partner to sign a notarized affidavit confirming impotency in order to get a prescription for Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs. The bill also requires men who take the drugs to be continually “tested for heart problems, receive counseling about possible side effects and receive information about “pursuing celibacy as a viable lifestyle choice.”” (Addicting Info via Rebecca)

It’s about to melt your brain: “Inside this beaker is a 50-meter-long string of 8,000 beads. Watch what happens when you toss one end of the string out of the beaker. Prepare yourself – this is pretty wild.” (io9).

‘Aliens could be watching aliens watching aliens. That’s a realistic prospect now that three potentially habitable planets – a record – have been glimpsed orbiting the same star.

Earlier studies had suggested that a nearby star, Gliese 667C, had three planets, only one of which might support life. But the very presence of multiple planets made their precise number hard to tease out.

Now Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the University of Göttingen in Germany and his colleagues have reanalysed the original data and added some new observations. They found evidence for up to seven worlds, including three rocky planets in the star’s habitable zone, where temperatures should suit life.’ (New Scientist).

‘

[Edward] Snowden’s no ordinary traveler. But his globe-hopping around the world made us think: Would it be possible for someone without his connections—in our increasingly connected age—to travel undetected?

Turns out, the answer is probably not.”Snowden could do this because he had a lot of help,” said Norie Quintos, executive editor of National Geographic Traveler. “I think for a typical traveler, it would be very hard to do.

“It’s a felony to use false identification, so you don’t want to go that route. Instead, it’s better if you just make it really, really hard for people to track you down, said Frank M. Ahearn, author of How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace. Ahearn spent over 20 years working as an investigator tracking down people who don’t want to be found. He then realized he could make more money helping people who wanted to disappear—actually leave without a trace.’ (National Geographic).

In Nagaland, in northeastern India, the “world’s hottest chilis” were first used as solvents to strip the flesh off the trophy skulls taken by the headhunting hill tribes. They have also been used in crowd-control grenades. But, now, these Bhut Jolokia chilis are eaten. Mary Roach reports on attending a chili-eating contest. (Smithsonian Magazine).

A mysterious and beautiful 15th-century text that some researchers have recently deemed to be gibberish may not be a hoax after all. A new study suggests the text shares quantifiable features with genuine language, and so may contain a coded message.

That verdict emerges from a statistical technique that puts a figure on the information content of elements in a text or code, even if their meaning is unknown. The technique could also be used to determine whether there is meaning in genomes, possible messages from aliens or even the signals between neurons in the brain.

The Voynich manuscript has baffled and captivated researchers since book dealer Wilfred Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains illustrations of naked nymphs, unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams and pages and pages of text in an unidentified alphabet. (New Scientist).

“Want to get chummy with a chickadee? There’s an app for that. But is it good for the birds?” (National Geographic).

Related articles

• Nature reserves say birdsong apps could disrupt wildlife in a major way (theverge.com)
• Bird Photographers Beware: Birdsong Apps May Seriously Disrupt Wildlife (petapixel.com)
• Mobile apps that mimic birdsong are threatening the nesting habits of rare migratory species, experts warn (dailymail.co.uk)
• Birdsong app ‘putting birds off nesting’ (telegraph.co.uk)
• The surprising uses for birdsong (bbc.co.uk)

“Stoners, pill-poppers and drug regulators everywhere: turn your eyes to New Zealand. The country looks set to adopt new laws permitting the limited sale of some designer drugs for recreational purposes. The legislation is the first in the world to regulate new recreational drugs based on scientific evidence of their risk of harm.” (New Scientist).

“For every designer drug the authorities ban, clandestine labs are churning out a new version. No wonder the law cant keep up…” ( — Vaughan Bell, The Observer).

Is this the elusive Jersey Devil as some Redditors have speculated? Perhaps its the dreaded Chupacabras? Or a bastard cousin of the Montauk Monster? The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation claims its just a furless squirrel. But then, thats what theyd want us to think. (Boing Boing).

Scientists dissect the weather in ‘Game of Thrones’: “A group of graduate students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University have published a research paper PDF

suggesting that the most likely cause of the unpredictable weather in Westeros is that the world is orbiting not one, but two stars.” (Crave – CNET).

Charitable Giving

The Tampa Bay Times has done some excellent investigative reporting on the 50 worst charities in America — organizations that took in more than $1 billion over the past 10 years, and gave almost all of that money to their own staffs and professional solicitors. The series explains how charities like this operate and skirt the regulatory system. But if you’re feeling TLDR, there’s also a PDF that can help you quickly figure out if you’re donating to one of these scams. A large portion of the 50 worst is made up of charities devoted to cancer and veterans’ issues. (Boing Boing).

…Relieved to find out that none of those listed are on my charitable giving list.

Related:

• Worst Charities In America Give Charities A Bad Name
• Investigation Ranks Worst Charities
• The Fifty Worst Charities in America
• America’s 50 Worst Charities

The number of happy faces on Lego toy mini-figures has been decreasing since the 1990s, and the number of angry faces has increased, giving rise to concerns that children could be affected by the negativity of the toys.

In a study of 3,655 figures produced between 1975 and 2010, Dr Christoph Bartneck, a robot expert at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, said the manufacturer appeared to be moving towards more conflict-based themes in its toys. Bartneck’s study considered the range of facial expressions across various Lego sets – now often in themes such as Star Wars, pirates or Harry Potter. (The Guardian).

Awe-inspiring short timelapse film  of a supercell storm by Mike Olbinski (Vimeo)

Related articles

• Witness the terrifying birth of a supercell thunderstorm
• Mind-Blowing Supercell Thunderstorm Filmed Near Booker, Texas
• The Most Epic Supercell Thunderstorm Footage You Will See Today
• Insane Timelapse of a Texas Supercell Tornado

Just after summer sunsets in northern latitudes, shimmering, wispy clouds appear in the twilight sky. This year, these noctilucent clouds have appeared earlier and farther south than ever before.

Noctilucent clouds exist higher in Earth’s atmosphere than any other cloud type. First observed in 1885 following the eruption of Krakatoa, they were a sight reserved for Earth’s northernmost residents. In recent years, however, their intensity and frequency have increased, often at latitudes previously thought to be too far south for noctilucent clouds to form.

In 2009, scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research pointed to the southern creep of noctilucent clouds as an early warning signal for climate change high in the atmosphere. Now, new data from NASA’s cloud-observing AIM satellite supports this possibility. (Wired.com).

Related articles

• The Rarest Clouds In The World May Have Origins In Space… The Mystery Of The Noctilucent Clouds
• An Early Start for Noctilucent Clouds
• Earth’s atmosphere morphing: Early formation of noctilucent clouds dismay scientists
• Noctilucent clouds behaving strangely
• Time-Lapse: Northern Lights and Noctilucent Clouds
• Early formation of noctilucent clouds dismay scientists
• Noctilucent clouds get an early start
• Earth’s atmosphere morphing: Early formation of noctilucent clouds dismay scientists

An anonymous weblogger who is a mental health practitioner writes about the potential effect of NSA spying on psychiatric patient confidentiality:

“I started thinking about what those records and metadata could reveal. Because my phone is used mainly for calls to and from patients and clients, can the NSA figure out who my patients are? And could they, with just a query or bit of analysis, figure out when my patients were going into crisis or periods of symptom worsening? I suspect that they can. And because I am nationally and internationally known as an expert on a particular disorder, could the government also deduce the diagnosis or diagnoses of my patients or their family members? Probably.” (PHIprivacy.net).

Related articles

• The ACLU Is Suing The NSA
• FLASHBACK – Spy Agency Sought U.S. Call Records Before 9/11, Lawyers Say
• Verizon Ordered To Provide All Customer Data To NSA
• NSA has been collecting records on every call made in America for the last seven years

Related articles

• Iain Banks dies aged 59 (guardian.co.uk)
• R.I.P. Iain (M.) Banks, Seminal Scottish Genre Jumper (1954-2013) (omnivoracious.com)
• Scottish author Iain Banks dies of cancer months after diagnosis (news.stv.tv)
• Scottish author Iain Banks dies from cancer aged 59 (irishtimes.com)
• Iain Banks 1954-2013 (socialistworker.co.uk)
• Iain Banks Has Passed Away (tor.com)

”

Campaigns are underway online to raise support — and cash — for the recently revealed source who leaked details of the NSA’s PRISM program.” (CNET).

Scientists already knew that people and dogs with their species’ version of OCD—canine compulsive disorder, or CCD—show similar behaviors, respond to the same medications, and have a genetic basis to their disorders.

But for the first time, MRI brain scans of eight CCD-affected Doberman pinschers show that dogs and people also share certain brain characteristics. (National Geographic)

“The internet is aflame with the news that the National Security Agency may be spying on phone calls and internet access of American citizens, and the possibility that they’ve partnered with some of the biggest tech companies in the world—Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Skype, and others—to request and access data directly whenever they want it. Let’s take a look at what exactly is going on, how long it’s been happening, and what—if anything—you can do about it.” (Lifehacker).

Related articles

• How to avoid NSA spying
• Top-Secret NSA Internet Spying Program ‘PRISM’ Uncovered
• By the numbers: The NSA’s super-secret spy program, PRISM
• Privacy is dead: So what if you friended the NSA?

As LSD turns 70 this year, fear and scorn fog our view of the drug. Fear is to do with the memories of its use in secret CIA mind control experiments on unwitting people in the 1950s. And those who scorn the self-indulgence of modern youth believe laxness tracks back to LSD’s recreational use a decade later, when acid advocate Timothy Leary called on American youth to “turn on, tune in, drop out”.

LSD provided the capstone for a grand European project to explore the psyche that was begun by the poet Goethe, developed by anatomist Jan Purkinje and physicist Ernst Mach, and carried to visionary territory by the psychoanalytic troika of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein – only to be nearly wiped out by the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

LSD has become interwoven with modern culture. From Steve Jobs to philosopher Arne Naess, from the computer mouse to “deep ecology”, there’s little in the late-20th century zeitgeist that is acid-free. (New Scientist).

Related:

• Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and LSD/Acid
• LSD inventor Albert Hofmann dead at age 102
• LSD… What is it all about?
• Widower Remains Behind Bars on Murder Charge While Prosecutor Waits to Confirm First LSD Fatality
• Today is the anniversary of LSD inventor/discoverer Albert Hofman’s death (*epilepsy warning)
• Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hoffman and His Discovery of LSD
• Download Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap Mixtape
• Seeing the Face of Me

“Just as the Sex Pistols invigorated a hidebound rock establishment, so contemporary noir could wake up literary novels to a wider world…” (guardian.co.uk)

Related articles

• Why do we read crime fiction?
• The Crime Fiction Handbook by Peter Messent

“We’re fast approaching the point, says Con Slobodchikoff, when computers will help to mediate our communications with animals.” (The Atlantic).

Related articles

• Researcher decodes prairie dog language, discovers they’ve been talking about us (Video) (treehugger.com)
• Animal Minds: Latest Research From the Scientists’ Mouths (psychologytoday.com)
• those must be CURSEs!!!! (shoosmita.wordpress.com)

Scientists now have definitive proof that many of the landscapes seen on Mars were indeed cut by flowing water.

The valleys, channels and deltas viewed from orbit have long been thought to be the work of water erosion, but it is Nasa’s latest rover, Curiosity, that has provided the “ground truth“.

Researchers report its observations of rounded pebbles on the floor of the Red Planet’s 150km-wide Gale Crater.

Their smooth appearance is identical to gravels found in rivers on Earth.

Rock fragments that bounce along the bottom of a stream of water will have their edges knocked off, and when these pebbles finally come to rest they will often align in a characteristic overlapping fashion.

Curiosity has pictured these features in a number of rock outcrops at the base of Gale Crater. (BBC News)

A leading neurologist at the University of Oxford said this week that recent developments meant that science may one day be able to identify religious fundamentalism as a “mental illness” and a cure it.

During a talk at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday, Kathleen Taylor was asked what positive developments she anticipated in neuroscience in the next 60 years.

“One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” she explained, according to The Times of London. “Somebody who has for example become radicalised to a cult ideology – we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance.”

“I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults,” she explained. “I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness.” (The Raw Story).

Among all the conditions in the world of health, mental health occupies a unique and paradoxical place. On the one hand is over-treatment and over-medicalization of mental health issues, often fueled by a pharmaceutical industry interested in the broadening of the boundaries of “illness” and in the creation of more and wider diagnostic categories and thus markets for “selling sickness.” On the other hand exists profound under-recognition of the suffering and breadth of mental health issues affecting millions of people across geographies, which is a global problem. (PLOS Medicine).

The town of Beaumont is known as “Texas … with a little something extra.” But the industrial town along the Gulf Coast now has a more dubious distinction: It’s been named the saddest city in America—at least, if you’re measuring sadness on Twitter.

That’s according to a group of researchers at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who analyzed over 80 million words from more than ten million geotagged tweets written throughout 2011. The results of their study, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE, showed that the happiest tweeters in the U.S. live in Napa, California, and their sad counterparts live mostly in the Rust Belt and along the Gulf Coast border. (National Geographic).

I have next to no interest in alcohol and never frequent bars, but I now know what drinks to order if I want my bartender to look down on me. Most despised drink is Long Island Iced Tea, in case you were wondering. Bad things happen to people who order this drink, according to many of the bartenders polled. (Serious Eats)

On the other hand, I can see exactly where these baristas are coming from. (Serious Eats)

“10 otherworldly destinations for your bucket list” (Sierra Magazine via Boing Boing). I have been lucky enough to have been at four of the ten so far.

With the death in Barbados on Thursday of James Emmanuel ”Doc” Sisnett, at the age of 113 years and 90 days, Jiroemon Kimura, of Japan, has become the last man alive to have been born in the 19th century.

Literally the last man. There are, according to the Gerontolgy Research Group at UCLA, 21 women born before New Year’s Day, 1901, who are still with us, most of them living in the United States or Japan, with others in Europe and Canada.

But while the females born in the reign of Queen Victoria strongly outnumber him, Mr Kimura, born on April 19, 1897, has one record the girls can’t match – not just yet, anyway. At 116, the ”supercentenarian” is the oldest human on the planet. (Sydney Morning Herald via Boing Boing)

There’s a fungus among us—a hundred different species in fact—and nearly all take up residence on our feet, according to a study that appears in the journal Nature this week.

Only a few fungi species were found on other body parts known to house fungi—such as behind the ears and on palms—according to the most thorough analysis to date of our fungal “landscape.” (National Geographic)

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

Related articles

• Beast proves big cat did roam Britain – but it’s the stuff of legend now
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English: W Harbottle & Son, Joiner & Undertaker. Complete with Chapel of Rest but soon to be converted into apartments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

Related articles

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

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

”

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

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

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

Thai Piledriving. (YouTube)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think this is about? A clue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

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

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

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

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

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

On her window, she posted the following notice:

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

(TechCrunch).

 

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

(thedailybeast: Photo of the Day)

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles:

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

“As we mentioned earlier, a hacker calling himself or herself Guccifer has penetrated the electronic worlds of George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and a number of other political figures. Screengrabs of various email conversations that Bush, Clinton, and others have participated in have been floating around the internet. And it has come to our attention on this, the day of the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on the orders of George W. Bush, that one of those screengrabs credibly displays Bush’s private email address. It is: gwb@ogwb.org. Please let him know that you’re thinking of him today.” (Gawker)

Related articles

• Donald Rumsfeld Gets Absolutely Pummeled On Twitter For His 10th Anniversary Iraq War Tweet
• CNN Poll: 59% say it was dumb to send troops to Iraq
• A decade later and the Iraq debate is still contaminated with myths
• Dying vet’s ‘fuck you’ letter to George Bush & Dick Cheney needs to be read by every American
• Ten years on, Iraq war planners discredited
• Another Iraq war anniversary autopsy from a conservative: Conservatives discover war is hell

“The Rheobatrachus silus frog has been extinct since 1983. This unusual Australian creature was known for swallowing its eggs and then releasing the young from its mouth. That’s way too awesome to just let the animal be resigned to the biological history books.

Australian researchers have spent five years conducting experiments using somatic-cell nuclear transfer, a technique for creating a cloned embryo. Appropriately enough, it’s called the Lazarus Project. The scientists took donor eggs from a related frog and replaced the nuclei with dead nuclei from the extinct frog. Some of the eggs then began to grow.” (CNET).

Sign the petition on Change.org.

 

Why we celebrate an irrational number: “Even if you hate math, you’ll love Pi Day. Why? Because there’s pie… Pi Day is such a huge holiday that it’s hard to imagine it didn’t exist until 1988…” (National Geographic).

“The incidence of spiders eating bats could be more widespread than initially suspected, reports a study published March 13 in PLoS ONE. To reach this conclusion, the authors spoke with scientists, conducted an extensive scientific literature review, dug through the blogosphere, and looked for pictures of spiders eating bats on Flickr.

The search turned up 52 reports of bat-eating spiders, less than half of which had been published before.

The authors report that bat-munching spiders live on every continent except Antarctica. Most catch bats in webs, like the giant golden silk orb-weavers (Nephilidae). As adults, these spiders’ leg spans can be 10-15 centimeters across, and they weave webs more than a meter in diameter. Bats have also been observed in the webs of social spiders, such as Parawixia. But a minority of spiders, like huntsman and tarantulas, forage for prey without a web, and have been spotted munching on bats on forest floors.” (Wired Science)

‘Most of us can gather, process and synthesise stimuli from the world around us. Walk into a gallery, admire a painting, and we’re able to observe and respond to it, then share our reactions with others in a way they understand.

But that simply isn’t true for a minority of people who suffer from neurological conditions. Be it dementia, synaesthesia or something incredibly rare like agnosia – where the brain can’t tie physical stimuli to concepts – some people experience the world in ways that most of us can’t begin to appreciate.

With that lack of understanding, sadly, comes a natural, but nonetheless damaging, stigma. “There’s a coarse level of understanding of neuropsychology outside of academia, which means people are sometimes scared of neurological conditions,” points out Glyn Humphreys of the University of Oxford, who’s been involved with the organisation of Affecting Perception, an exhibition of work by artists who suffer from a variety of neurological conditions.’ (New Scientist CultureLab)

“Most likely, it was wolves that approached us, not the other way around, probably while they were scavenging around garbage dumps on the edge of human settlements. The wolves that were bold but aggressive would have been killed by humans, and so only the ones that were bold and friendly would have been tolerated.

Friendliness caused strange things to happen in the wolves. They started to look different. Domestication gave them splotchy coats, floppy ears, wagging tails. In only several generations, these friendly wolves would have become very distinctive from their more aggressive relatives. But the changes did not just affect their looks. Changes also happened to their psychology. These protodogs evolved the ability to read human gestures.” (National Geographic).

‘The world’s first brain-to-brain connection has given rats the power to communicate by thought alone.

“Many people thought it could never happen,” says Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Although monkeys have been able to control robots with their mind using brain-to-machine interfaces, work by Nicolelis’s team has, for the first time, demonstrated a direct interface between two brains – with the rats able to share both motor and sensory information.’ (New Scientist).