‘Wednesday night, Donald Trump said something that made a nuclear war between the United States and Russia more likely. With a few thoughtless words, he made World War III — the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in nuclear holocaust — plausible.

This probably scans like hyperbole, the kind of thing you hear a lot in politics. I assure you, it’s not. Not this time.

What Trump said, in an interview published by the New York Times, is that he wouldn’t necessarily defend the United States’ allies in NATO if they were attacked by a foreign power. This extended, Trump said, to the Baltic countries right on Russia’s border — countries Russia might conceivably invade…’

Source: Vox

‘…The disjointed nature of the convention betrays a serious problem with the GOP right now: As much as Republicans have grudgingly come around to Trump, they don’t seem to agree on what exactly he stands for, and they don’t have a clear message for the American people about why they deserve to be elected….’

Source: Vox

‘[B]y upsetting the Republican Party of 2016, Cruz is positioning himself to be the man who saves the party after the year is over. He’s making a bet: that Donald Trump will fail catastrophically in November and the Republican Party’s next leader will be someone who wasn’t implicated in the catastrophe. Ted Cruz wants to be that someone.’

Source: Vox

‘In a convention full of irresponsible speeches, Newt Gingrich’s may have just taken the cake. Its takeaway message — and I’m paraphrasing only slightly — is that if you don’t elect Donald Trump, ISIS could nuke an American city. He said that electing Hillary Clinton could very well destroy the United States.”The cost of Hillary’s dishonesty could be the loss of America as we know it,” Gingrich warned.

His speech was useful, in a sense. Not as instruction on terrorism — it wrong was in every major particular.It was useful instead in exposing what’s so terrifying about the role foreign policy plays in Trumpism. At the Republican convention, foreign policy is generally reduced to terrorism, and terrorism is hyped to make the world look far more terrifying than it is. ISIS isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s a culture war wedge, one designed to make Hillary Clinton into a villain and Trump into a conquering hero. It is base fearmongering, designed to terrify people into voting for an authoritarian who wants to punish huge numbers of Muslims for the actions of a tiny few.

And that crowd, judging from the reaction to Gingrich’s speech, is eating it up.

Gingrich is wrong about everything, Much of Gingrich’s speech is too vague to fact-check — just scary-sounding platitudes masquerading as truth-telling and brave honesty. But the basic message, that the terrorists will somehow defeat America, is impossible to miss.”We are at war with radical Islamists, we are losing the war, and we must change course to win the war,” Gingrich says. This threat is so grave, according to him, that electing Hillary Clinton might well cause a catastrophic terrorist attack, which (somehow) would endanger the United States itself…

When Gingrich gets specific, attempting to actually defend his theory that the US is “losing” a war on terrorism, his speech becomes nonsensical…’

Source: Vox

‘When humans speak up, the little African birds called honeyguides listen—and can understand, a new study confirms for the first time. Honeyguides in northern Mozambique realize that when a man makes a special trilling sound, he wants to find a bees’ nest—and its delectable honey. Birds that hear this trill often lead human hunters to a nest, receiving a reward of honeycomb.

Communication between domesticated species and people is well known, but “the fascinating point in the case of the honeyguide is that it describes such a relationship between a wild animal and humans,” says behavioral biologist Claudia Wascher of Anglia Ruskin University in Great Britain, who was not involved with the new research…’

Source: National Geographic

‘Scientists have long believed that non-human animals care only about survival, spending their waking hours in search of food and engaging in activities that enhance their odds of survival in some way. Now a recent study in the Journal of Mammalogy of the way animals linger around their dead, and touch them, says we’re witnessing something much different than a survival instinct. It’s grief…’

Source: Big Think

‘One way to make sure robots and AI stay on the helpful side is to imbue them with empathy. That’s at least according to expert Murray Shanahan. He is a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London. But is it actually possible to develop a feeling robot? Not only is it possible, Shanahan thinks it’s necessary…’

Source: Big Think

‘Melbourne, Australia’s Transport Accident Commission commissioned an artist, trauma surgeon, and road safety engineer to imagine and design a human built to survive car wrecks. The result is Graham, seen above…’

Source: Boing Boing

Third Eye Blind trolled the RNC by playing Third Eye Blind songs no one wants to hear

‘… “I want something else to get me through this” is the linchpin of the chorus in “Semi-Charmed Life,” the most popular song the ’90s band Third Eye Blind has ever created. The jaunty track is about the allure of crystal meth addiction and the itchy desperation of desiring an escape.

And on Tuesday night, Third Eye Blind inflicted a similar kind of distress at the Republican National Convention during an after-party, surprising guests with messages of gay rights and science and serenading them with some of the band’s more obscure songs, while withholding the most popular song in their discography.

The crowd was not pleased, but Third Eye Blind didn’t care. “You can boo all you want, but I’m the motherfucking artist up here,” lead singer Stephan Jenkins said…’

Source:  Vox

Donald Trump’s first 2 speakers made the subtext text : Though the theme was “make America safe again,” the first two speakers on Monday evening weren’t military veterans, law enforcement professionals, crime victims, or politicians. They were C-list celebrities Willie Robertson from Duck Dynasty and Scott Baio …

Chaos at the convention (but not where you’d expect) : The convention hasn’t exactly started on the right foot for Trump…

An ex-senator called Trump backers “brownshirts,” in case you wondered how the RNC’s going : Former Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-NH) hasn’t been a major national political figure for some time. While he was a leading conservative in the Senate from 1978 to 1990, he faded away after he declined to seek reelection that year… But he surged back into the limelight as a leading #NeverTrump delegate to the Convention…

The RNC platform, explained : This year’s platform bears the distinctive mark of Donald Trump: It calls for stricter controls on immigration and an “America first” trade policy. But the platform isn’t just about Trump…

Stephen Colbert wasn’t supposed to speak at the RNC, but that didn’t stop him: The comedian and host of The Late Show on CBS made a surprise speech at Quicken Loans Arena on Sunday, welcoming everyone to the “2016 Republican National Hungry…

The chaos that just broke out on the Republican convention floor, explained : The opening session of the Republican convention briefly dissolved into chaos Monday afternoon, as pro-Trump and anti-Trump delegates shouted competing chants at each other and brought proceedings to a halt. Shouts of “Roll call vote!” and “Dump Trump” rang out in front of an empty stage, as anti-Trump delegates, including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, demanded a full roll call…

The 5 most uncomfortable moments from Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s first joint interview : When Donald Trump announced Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, it was widely seen as an uncharacteristically establishment pick for a presidential candidate known for bombastic — and often wildly inaccurate — statements…

Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes interview left me wondering if he even wants to be president : On Sunday night, Donald Trump and Mike Pence sat down with 60 Minutes ’ Lesley Stahl for their first joint interview . It got weird quickly. ”

Melania Trump: the 5 most important things to read to understand Donald Trump’s wife

Source: Vox

Conventions, particularly Republican conventions, usually attract protests and violence. But where Donald Trumpt goes, violence all too often follows. And this convention has become a destination for extremists of all stripes. The killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge has people worried that even a peaceful protest can be a cover for extremists, particularly because anyone can bring a gun to Cleveland. The Cleveland police, feeling unsupported, might lash out. And, perhaps most important, predicting violence (like this) might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Source: Vox

‘At the root of these protests is the extraordinary passion Trump has inspired — not just among his supporters, but also for his opposition. After all, every candidate faces some level of opposition or protest, but Trump is clearly inspiring something unique.

So why are Trump’s opponents so passionate? In short, Trump is explicit in his bigotry in a way that people find extremely dangerous. That’s not solely because a President Trump would rule in a racist, xenophobic, or misogynistic way, but also because his campaign’s success represents a dissolution of American norms that reject outright bigotry — a shift that could have implications far beyond 2016.

Rebecca Pletewski, a leading member of Ohio-based Stand Together Against Trump, which will protest this week, had a long list ready of Trump’s worst hits: “He came out of the gate calling for a complete shutdown of Muslims coming into the country and for surveillance of mosques. He’s implied that Mexicans coming into this country are all rapists and murderers, and that a federal judge would be incapable of doing his job because of his Mexican heritage. He’s attacked any critic or opponent with violence and bullying, especially if you’re female. He’d rather call you a fat dog, a pig, a basket-case — just no respect for any [woman] unless they’re pretty and pageant-worthy.” The list goes on and on.

Time and time again, this was the consistent theme for why protesters and activists told me they’re terrified by Trump’s rise: It’s not just they disagree with his policies — although they do — but that they find his rhetoric and attitude bigoted in a way that’s particularly negative and, crucially, very influential…’

Source: Vox

‘Best orchid species ever: Telipogon diabolicus!’

Source: Boing Boing

‘If Britain can leave the European Union, what if blacks left the U.S.? If they did, what would the impact be? Dr. Ulysses Burley III tells NPR’s Lynn Neary about all the things the country would lose…’

Source: NPR

‘The 2016 political season has been the most fractious in living memory. This week, America’s potpourri of turmoil will coalesce in Cleveland as groups from around the country come to support or protest the Republican National Convention. Or more accurately, they’ve come here because of Donald Trump, the demigod of modern American disarray.

Capturing these confrontations will be the nation’s corps of photo and video journalists. And many of them are packing protective gear—kevlar vests, helmets, gas masks—stuff that usually stays in the closet unless their assignment is a war zone…’

Source: WIRED

‘In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 opus The Birds, two outsiders arrive in a seaside town in northern California with a cage of love birds in tow. Their arrival in the Bodega Bay triggers birds of all types to begin attacking the residents in the area, but Hitchcock ultimately leaves the reason for this strange avian behavior a mystery.

Luckily, new research published in Biology Letters which found that birds that live in areas with high human populations (urban/suburban areas) are more territorially aggressive than birds in rural areas might be able to shed some light on this Hitchcockian mystery.

“A possible reason for this is that these birds have less space but better resources to defend,” said Scott Davies, a postdoctoral associate in biological sciences at Virginia Tech. “Living near humans provides better food and shelter, but it also means more competition for these limited resources.” …’

Source: Motherboard

‘I do not know how to explain what I just watched.It should be easy.

Donald Trump introduced Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. There it is. One sentence. Eleven words. But that doesn’t explain what happened any better than “I spent a few hours letting lysergic acid diethylamide mimic serotonin in my brain” explains an acid trip. What just happened was weird, and it was important.

Back in May, EJ Dionne wrote that the hardest thing about covering Donald Trump would be “staying shocked.” Watching him, day after day, week after week, month after month, the temptation would be to normalize his behavior, “to move Trump into the political mainstream.”

But today helped. Donald Trump’s introduction of Mike Pence was shocking. Forget the political mainstream. What happened today sat outside the mainstream for normal human behavior.

It began in irony. Before Pence, before Trump, there was an empty podium, and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers. It had been widely reported that few top Republicans were willing to serve as Trump’s running mate. It had been widely reported that Trump was unsure about Pence, that he had regretted the decision almost as soon as he made it, that he had sought ways to reverse himself. Hours before the announcement, Trump tweeted that Pence was “my first choice from the start!”, which is a thing presidential candidates typically do not need to say.So there we were. Waiting for Trump and Pence to emerge. And what Rolling Stones song did the campaign choose? What did we all hear, over and over again, as we waited for Trump to introduce Mike Pence, his “first choice from the start!”?”You can’t always get what you want…”

Now back to Mike Pence…What started as farce continued as farce. Trump emerged without Pence. He spoke, alone, at a podium adorned with Trump’s name, but not Pence’s. And then Trump proceeded to talk about himself for 28 minutes. There is no other way to say this than to say it: it was the single most bizarre, impulsive, narcissistic performance I have ever seen from a major politician.There is no way I will be able to properly described Trump’s speech to you. You should really just go and watch it yourself…’

Source: Ezra Klein, Vox

‘Towns in Mississippi and other Tea Party-ruled states with large (often private) prison industries are totally reliant on state/fed funding transfers to local prisons for cash and jobs, forced prison labor to provide local services for free, and War on Drugs arrests and minimum sentencing to fill those jails. The first tiny steps toward criminal justice reform have eroded the underpinnings of the whole system, leaving the towns facing collapse.Increasing vacancy rates in these prisons mean less revenue (and less free, forced labor), but the counties and towns still have to keep up payments on the bonds they floated to raise the money to build their prisons…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘…[A]n article in The Atlantic describes how paranoia and psychosis are more common in cities and why the quest to explain the ‘urban psychosis effect’ is reshaping psychiatry.

The more urban your neighbourhood, the higher the rate of diagnosed schizophrenia and you are more likely to experience what are broadly known as ‘non-affective psychosis-psychoses’ – that is, delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia not primarily caused by mood problems.

This has led to a long and ongoing debate about why this is, with some arguing that it is an effect of city-living on the mind, while others arguing the association is better explained by a complex interaction between genetic risk factors and limited life chances.

The article discusses the science behind exactly this debate, partly a judgement on the value of the city itself, and notes how it’s pushing psychiatry to re-examine how it deals with what is often euphemistically called ‘the environment’. Link to ‘The Mystery of Urban Psychosis’ in The Atlantic…’

Source: Mind Hacks

Sorry. Couldn’t. Care. Less.

Source: Big Think

Here’s what Penn Jillette has to say about turning into an atheist.

Source: Big Think

This came as a surprise to New York City.

‘On the corner of Bank Street and Sixth Street in the quaint mining town of Wallace, Idaho, you will find a manhole. Initially, it may seem like an unremarkable sewer cover, but step a bit closer and you’ll realize it is much, much more: It is the Center of the Universe.The town of Wallace is four by nine blocks and has a current population of 784 citizens. But in 2004, the mayor made a proclamation: “I, Ron Garitone, Mayor of Wallace, Idaho, and all of its subjects, and being of sound body and mind, do hereby solemnly declare and proclaim Wallace to be the Center of the Universe.” …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘A growing body of research now links experiencing racism to poorer health outcomes—from depression to low-birth weight to cardiovascular disease.

Racism, blatant or subtle, marks the bodies of those who have to live with it. Much of the research, though not all, comes from the experience of African Americans in the US.  “The literature is quite consistent,” says Naa Oyo Kwate, a psychologist and professor of Africana studies at Rutgers. “The more racism you experience, the worse your health experience in a number of domains.”

Experiencing racism, whether it’s violence or insults or more subtle snubbing, makes life more difficult. That added stress becomes “allostatic load,” which disrupts the normal function of the body: more stress means more cortisol in the body means more cardiovascular disease. “You’re continually having to respond to this kind of stress in the body and this kind of wear and tear,” says Kwate.

…Even subtle racism can hurt. In a 2012 study, researchers compared the performance of students trying to solve a simple task after they had experienced subtle or blatant racism from the person at the desk next to them. The subtle stuff—having someone inch away while sitting next to the student—was a bigger drag on performance than the blatant bigotry. Uncertainty about racism in a situation can sometimes make it worse. Vicarious experiences matter, too. A preliminary study in 2010 catalogued the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in students who not only experienced but witnessed racist incidents. The more vicarious incidents they experienced, the more signs of trauma. “So much of what people contend with is not just their individual experience, but also their family and friends and broader society with the police killings,” says Kwate…’

Source: WIRED

“It might be justified to use remotely controlled robots to apply lethal force where such force is justified,” Jay Stanley, a senior legal analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union told me. “As a legal matter, the choice of weapon in a decision to use lethal force does not change the constitutional calculus, which hinges on whether an individual poses an imminent threat to others, and whether the use of lethal force is reasonable under the circumstances.”

Dallas police chief David Brown told reporters Friday that the force “saw no other option than to use our bomb robot” to kill Johnson, and said that prior to using the bomb, Johnson and officers on the force exchanged gunfire.

“It is essentially a jury-rigged version of a drone strike,” Ryan Calo, a University of Washington School of Law professor specializing in cyber and robotic law, told me. “If they would have been justified in throwing a grenade, then they’re likely justified in doing this, which was quite frankly a creative thing.”

Source: Motherboard

A number of nations put out notices this week about police violence and demonstrations.

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘A team of researchers led by Dr. Hélène Rougier of California State University has announced a landmark discovery in the journal Scientific Reports this week. The team has uncovered evidence of cannibalism among a population of Neanderthals at the Goyet cave site in Belgium—the first discovery of Neanderthal cannibalism in Northern Europe.

Paleoanthropologists have debated evidence for Neanderthal cannibalism for over 100 years, since researchers first discovered remains believed to show evidence of cannibalism in Croatia, although those findings were later disproven. More recently, cannibalized remains were found in France in 1999, Spain in 2006, and in other parts of Southern Europe.

The Goyet remains, which consist of four adolescent or adult neanderthals and one child—the largest discovery of cannibalized remains in Northern Europe—exhibit cut marks where flesh and muscle was separated from bone and percussion marks where bones were crushed to extract marrow. The research team concluded the remains were processed for consumption based on the similar treatment of horses and reindeer remains also found at the site. Because there is no evidence that modern humans were in the area, the scientists believe it is most likely the remains were butchered by other Neanderthals. Basically, it’s a clear case of cannibalism.There’s also evidence the remains weren’t solely used as a food source, as some bones appear to have been used as tools to reshape or sharpen stones. Neanderthals’ use of other Neanderthals’ bones as tools has been seen before in Croatia and France, but the quantity found in Belgium far surpasses what has been recovered at the other sites. Eerily, the researchers note that the living Neanderthals “may have been aware that they were using human remains” as tools, although it’s unclear whether the use was ceremonial or functional.

While the discovery represents “unambiguous evidence” that Neanderthals in Northern Europe practiced cannibalism, the findings shed little light on the motivations behind the behavior. In the published results, the research team argues that the state of preservation of the remains makes it “highly unlikely” that cannibalism was part of a funerary rite, although they acknowledge that it’s ultimately “impossible to infer the behavioural signature represented by these remains.” …’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Twenty-six times since 1972, the world’s timekeepers have added a leap second to the clock, the last time being on June 30 of last year, when the day got a little longer, even if you might not have noticed.

It’s going to happen again this year, according to the Associated Press, with the leap second added to the final day of 2016, when the clock will strike 11 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds. Ordinarily the next tick would be midnight, but timekeepers said this year it will be 11:59:60, before turning over to 12:00.

The leap second isn’t necessary on some years, if the Earth orbits more quickly around the Sun. But an official from the U.S. Naval Observatory told the AP that the Earth was a bit slower around the Sun this year, in part because of El Niño…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Q: I want to hear what the loudest thing in the world is! — Kara Jo, age 5

No. No, you really don’t. See, there’s this thing about sound that even we grown-ups tend to forget — it’s not some glitter rainbow floating around with no connection to the physical world. Sound is mechanical. A sound is a shove — just a little one, a tap on the tightly stretched membrane of your ear drum. The louder the sound, the heavier the knock. If a sound is loud enough, it can rip a hole in your ear drum. If a sound is loud enough, it can plow into you like a linebacker and knock you flat on your butt. When the shock wave from a bomb levels a house, that’s sound tearing apart bricks and splintering glass. Sound can kill you.

Consider this piece of history: On the morning of Aug. 27, 1883, ranchers on a sheep camp outside Alice Springs, Australia, heard a sound like two shots from a rifle. At that very moment, the Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa was blowing itself to bits 2,233 miles away. Scientists think this is probably the loudest sound humans have ever accurately measured. Not only are there records of people hearing the sound of Krakatoa thousands of miles away, there is also physical evidence that the sound of the volcano’s explosion traveled all the way around the globe multiple times…’

Source: Maggie Koerth-Baker, FiveThirtyEight

‘‘Do-it-yourself’ users of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) seek enhanced brain function; scientific community warns of unintended results …’

Via EurekAlert! Science News

’… [T]he simple act of sniffing can infect you with a bacteria that has a 50 percent chance of killing you.

We’ve long known about the bacteria, which is called Burkholderia pseudomallei and leads to a disease called melioidosis found in southeast Asia and Australia. But until this week’s findings, published in the journal Immunity and Society, we didn’t know that how people contracted it. By studying mice, scientists found that the bacteria is transmitted from the nose to the brain stem to the spinal cord in as little as 24 hours.

“Imagine walking around and you sniff it up from the soil and the next day you’ve got this bacteria in your brain and damaging the spinal cord,” said James St John, who is head of the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research at Griffith University. Griffith, along with Bond University, collaborated on the study.

Even better, once you made that decisive sniff, you might not know it’s there for years and years. The longest-known incubation period for the bacteria is 62 years. In that extraordinary case, one man contacted the bacteria after being taken as prisoner of war by the Japanese in World War II, and had no idea for the next six decades.

“It could just be sitting there waiting for an opportune moment, or it could just be doing small incremental damage over a lifetime. You could lose the function in your brain incrementally,” continued elite-level fearmonger St. John, who added that the study’s results were interesting because it showed that other bacteria could also use this pathway. Great news, for science! Also, he thinks the bacteria could be used as a bioweapon, which is an interesting development for science, but terrifying for us.

Melioidosis kills about 89,000 people a year with symptoms such as fever, bone pain, and abscesses in the liver. Nearly half the population in southeast Asia may have it, and the mortality rate is as high as 50 percent in places like Cambodia and northern Australia…’

Via Gizmodo

‘…The recent victory of the Brexiters in the referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU has led many people to reflect on–and worry about–similarities between support for Trump in the US and support for Brexit in the UK. Clearly, both campaigns have appealed to racist attitudes and anti-immigrant sentiments; indeed, this has been a core element without which neither would have got off the ground. The lack of clarity about what Leavers think Brexit will entail, and the immediate backpedalling after their victory of those who campaigned for it, is also revealing. It looks like a classic case of chickens coming home to roost when overly simple solutions are proposed for complex problems. And Trump’s critics hope the US electorate will draw the appropriate moral from this.

…It seems blindingly obvious that Trump is a narcissistic, mendacious windbag, an attention junkie who manifestly lacks the knowledge, experience, judgment, and character that one would hope for in any individual who wishes to shoulder the responsibilities of high office. Asked by journalists to explain their position, Trump supporters seem to traffic mainly in vacuities or absurdities…

But suppose we bracket the racism, the xenophobia, the hopeful embracing of simplistic solutions, and (in the case of Trump supporters) the messianic faith in an individual savior. Are there, in addition, cogent reasons why people might vote for Trump. I think there are, although “cogent” does not here mean “good”; it just means understandable in rational terms. And here, too, there are interesting parallels between the appeal of Brexit and the appeal of Trump…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

‘In 2006 historian Ben Macintyre suggested in The Times that the internet had “chased off” the UFOs. The web’s free-flowing, easy exchange of ideas and information had allowed UFO skeptics to prevail, and, to Macintyre, people were no longer seeing UFOs because they no longer believed in them.

Data seemed to back up Macintyre’s argument that, when it came to belief in UFOs, reason was winning out. A 1990 Gallup poll found that 27 percent of Americans believed “extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past.” That number rose to 33 percent in 2001, before dropping back to 24 percent in 2005.

But now “The X-Files” is back, and Hillary Clinton has even pledged to disclose what the government knows about aliens if elected president. Meanwhile, a recent Boston Globe article by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie suggests that belief in UFOs may be growing. She points to a 2015 Ipsos poll, which reported that 45 percent of Americans believe extraterrestrials have visited the Earth.

So much for reason.

Why does Western society continue to be fascinated with the paranormal? If science doesn’t automatically kill belief in UFOs, why do reports of UFOs and alien abductions go in and out of fashion? …’

Source: The Conversation

‘For years we’ve been told to reduce the amount of butter in our diets. Health guidelines, many of which have been around since the 1970s, have warned us about the dangers of eating food high in saturated fats, claiming—and often without merit—that they contribute to heart problems and other health issues. Increasingly, however, scientists are learning that saturated fats aren’t the demons they’ve been made out to be.

A new study published in PLOS ONE is now bolstering this changing tide of opinion, showing there’s no link between butter and chronic disease. This gigantic analysis—a meta-study that included a total of 636,151 individuals across 15 countries, and involving 6.5 million person-years of follow-up—showed no association between the consumption of butter and cardiovascular disease…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Nearly thirty years after an international treaty banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons, the Antarctic ozone hole is finally starting to heal. By mid to late century, it should be fully recovered. “This is a reminder that when the world gets together, we really can solve environmental problems,” Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist at MIT, told Gizmodo…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Plants, they’re just like us. Or at least enough like us that they can still judge risk and make good decisions even though they happen to have a few handicaps that we don’t…’

Source: Gizmodo

Via Atlas Obscura, thanks to Garrett

‘Back in December, Donald Trump’s personal doctor declared to the world that Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” While that particular claim is unfalsifiable (although almost certainly incorrect), according to a source with knowledge of Trump’s current prescriptions, that letter isn’t telling the whole story. Most notably: Donald Trump is allegedly still taking speed-like diet pills.

Rumors of Trump’s predilection for stimulants first started really popping up in 1992, when Spy magazine wrote, “Have you ever wondered why Donald Trump has acted so erratically at times, full of manic energy, paranoid, garrulous? Well, he was a patient of Dr. [Joseph] Greenberg’s from 1982 to 1985.” At the time, Dr. Greenberg was notorious for allegedly doling out prescription stimulants to anyone who could pay.

In 1993, Harry Hurt’s unauthorized biography on Trump, Lost Tycoon, corroborated the rumors and went one step further:

The diet drugs, which [Trump] took in pill form, not only curbed his appetite but gave him a feeling of euphoria and unlimited energy. The medical literature warned that some potentially dangerous side effects could result from long-term usage; they included anxiety, insomnia, and delusions of grandeur. According to several Trump Organization insiders, Donald exhibited all these ominous symptoms of diet drug usage, and then some.

The supposed drug Trump took back then was Tenuate Dospan, a drug with speed-like effects that’s not unlike dexedrine.

These rumors say Trump stopped seeing Dr. Greenberg decades ago. But according to our source, the Donald Trump of today is on a diet drug called phentermine—and has been since at least April of 2014…

C. Richard Allen, the director of the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency, called phentermine “cheap speed” to The New York Times. Side effects of phentermine include:

• Trouble with thinking, speaking, or walking
• Decreased ability to exercise
• False or unusual sense of well-being
• Insomnia
• Nervousness
• Increase in sexual ability, desire, drive, or performance
• Confusion …’

Via Gawker

‘Bacteria have been discovered in our guts that depend on one of our brain chemicals for survival. These bacteria consume GABA, a molecule crucial for calming the brain, and the fact that they gobble it up could help explain why the gut microbiome seems to affect mood.

Philip Strandwitz and his colleagues at Northeastern University in Boston discovered that they could only grow a species of recently discovered gut bacteria, called KLE1738, if they provide it with GABA molecules. “Nothing made it grow, except GABA,” Strandwitz said while announcing his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston last month.

GABA acts by inhibiting signals from nerve cells, calming down the activity of the brain, so it’s surprising to learn that a gut bacterium needs it to grow and reproduce. Having abnormally low levels of GABA is linked to depression and mood disorders, and this finding adds to growing evidence that our gut bacteria may affect our brains.

An experiment in 2011 showed that a different type of gut bacteria, called Lactobacillus rhamnosus, can dramatically alter GABA activity in the brains of mice, as well as influencing how they respond to stress. In this study, the researchers found that this effect vanished when they surgically removed the vagus nerve – which links the gut to the brain – suggesting it somehow plays a role in the influence gut bacteria can have on the brain. …’

Via New Scientist

‘…[C]oncealed carry laws… are now legal in all fifty states. In two decades the number of concealed-carry permit holders has increased from under five million to 12.8 million… More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War.

The media will always focus on mass shootings. While tragic, those are not the episodes that result in the majority of gun deaths. Those occur one by one, on late night streets outside of bars, in homes due to domestic fights or accidental shootings, and simply when someone’s vision is primed for violence and so decides to pre-empt the situation.

…[A] person holding a gun is more likely to misperceive an object in another person’s hand to be a gun…While a fringe community in size, the ‘Open Carry’ sect of gun advocates presents an even more dangerous proposition. Knowing, instead of imagining, that a potential adversary—really, who initially perceives a person walking toward you with a gun as a friend?—is armed does not hint at de-escalation of violence. The human brain simply is not built that way. Add in alcohol and anger, both which stoke and taunt the lizard brain, and the difference between self-defense and offense becomes difficult to discern…’

Source: Big Think

‘Jeet Heer explains that Republicans fell for Trump because of years of conservative policy that told them science, reason and skepticism were bad. Put simply, they were primed to be suckers: “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” …’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Mas Subramanian and his team at Oregon State University weren’t looking to create colors; they were just mixing chemicals together to see what they could produce. They were aiming for something with an electronics application. Instead, they got YInMn Blue—a new and vibrant blue pigment.

YInMn Blue came from mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with “other chemicals” and baking them in a 2,000 degree oven. One of the samples that came out was this beautiful blue color. Its name comes from some of those “other chemicals,” which included the elements Yttrium and Indium.

YInMn Blue has some other nice properties. It’s non-toxic! It’s very durable. And since it absorbs infrared waves with remarkable efficiency, it could be used to help keep buildings cool, if used in exterior paint. Imagine flying over a city of a roofs painted bright blue instead of dirty white or dark black. That’s a very beautiful future…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘This past weekend, the good people of Ålesund, Norway celebrated their annual Midsummer festival, Slinningsbålet. Like most celebrations, this one features eating, drinking, and other assorted revels.Unlike most ones, though, it also features a multi-story bonfire the size of the Statue of Liberty, which towers over the landscape for hours before collapsing into a waterfall of flames… Ålesund volunteers hand-build the bonfire out of pallets, hosting them up with ropes and stacking them into an elegant, building-shaped structure. When the time comes, they climb up their creation, light the wick at the top, and then climb back down again before the blaze begins.According to The Local, this year’s bonfire was the biggest ever, measuring about 155.5 feet tall. Video footage shows the flames slowly engulfing their scaffolding, as several fire boats tame them with constant streams… Eventually, the whole caboodle disintegrates into the surrounding ocean.

“We were sitting on the beach over 100 meters away, but the heat was still intense,” wrote festival attendee and Instagram user thegypsyviking. “I hope the gods are pleased.” ‘

Source: Atlas Obscura

Here are the Presidents who rated most strongly on psychopathic trends, as per a survey of Presidential biographers and historians. Note the inclusion of some of the Presidents rated best by historians (as well as GW Bush):

• Teddy Roosevelt
• John F. Kennedy
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Ronald Reagan
• Rutherford B. Hayes
• Zachary Taylor
• Bill Clinton
• Martin Van Buren
• Andrew Jackson
• George W. Bush

Some of our less-effective leaders were among the least strongly psychopathic: Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush.

‘Okay, so, what the hell? Here’s neuroscientist James Fallon.Why do we prefer leaders who are, as Fallon puts it, “world-champ liars, pathological liars, even for the hell of it?” Well, it turns out that they lie for us. We’re totally cool with someone being a psychopath as long as they’re our psychopath…’

Source: Big Think

Via NPR:

‘In his new book, What A Fish Knows: The Inner Lives Of Our Underwater Cousins, [Jonathan] Balcombe presents evidence that fish have a conscious awareness — or “sentience” — that allows them to experience pain, recognize individual humans and have memory. He argues that humans should consider the moral implications of how we catch and farm fish. …’

Via The Verge:

‘…An article in this week’s New York Magazine looks at Snowden’s life in exile and comes away with a unique insight into Snowden’s clemency plan. As Snowden’s central counsel, the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, puts it: “We’re going to make a very strong case between now and the end of this administration that this is one of those rare cases for which the pardon power exists.” …’

Via National Geographic:

‘“North Dakota is the last, best place in North America to keep bees…”

The state’s vast, open prairies with a sparse human population and scant agricultural development offer honeybees a safe haven. Buffered from farm pesticides, they can reap the nutritional benefits of pollen and nectar from a diverse array of flowering prairie plants.

But North Dakota is losing its prairie at an alarming rate.’

Dr Drang writes:

‘My stuff keeps lying to me.

My keyboard, trackpad, and mouse always tell me their batteries are nearly out of power weeks before they’re actually dead. All of the printers I connect to at work and at home, tell me their ink is getting low but continue to print just fine for at least another month.

I can appreciate the value in a well-timed warning—it gives me a chance to buy new supplies before the current set runs out—but when the warnings are consistently premature, they don’t have the desired effect. “Yeah, right,” I think when I see the ⚠︎ next to a printer’s name. “Do I look like I was born yesterday?”

The printer manufacturers at least have avarice as an excuse. They make their money on the ink cartridges they try to con you into buying before the old ones are spent. But I don’t understand the motive behind Apple’s premature ejaculations in Notifications. It’s not like my peripherals require Apple batteries.

Most people who are concerned about the coming Internet of Things Age decry the loss of privacy as their refrigerators spill the details on how much milk they buy. I’m more worried about my printer tracking me down over the internet to send me an urgent warning that its paper tray is only half full…’

Via Gawker:

‘An overachieving bigot in Nebraska reached an impressive new level of intolerance this week, filing a lawsuit against “Homosexuals”—as in all of them, everywhere—in a U.S. District Court on Friday, NBC News reports.

In the handwritten petition, 66-year-old Sylvia Driskell claims to be acting as ambassador for the plaintiffs, “God, and His, Son, Jesus Christ.” Appropriately titled Driskell v. Homosexuals, it asks U.S. District Judge John M. Gerrard to rule whether homosexuality “is a sin, or not a sin.” From the Omaha World-Herald:

Citing Bible verses, Driskell contends “that homosexuality is a sin and that they the homosexuals know it is a sin to live a life of homosexuality. Why else would they have been hiding in the closet(?)”

Driskell wrote in a seven-page petition to the court that God has said homosexuality is an abomination. She challenged the court to not call God a liar.

“I never thought that I would see a day in which our great nation or our own great state of Nebraska would become so compliant to the complicity of some people(’s) lewd behavior.”

Despite the suit naming hundreds of millions of defendants, however, the court’s docket notes no summons were issued.’

‘In March, Christy Sheats, 42, wrote on Facebook: “It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semiautomatic weapons.” On Friday she got into an argument with her two daughters and shot them both dead. Sheats herself was shot and killed by a police officer. …’

Via Boing Boing

‘A migraine is one of the most common health issues worldwide, affecting up to one in five people. But the mechanisms that drive migraines aren’t well understood. In fact, doctors and scientists are still trying to figure out if a migraine is primarily a vascular or a neurological disorder.  A new genome-wide association study published in Nature Genetics suggests that a migraine may primarily stem from problems with the blood supply system.

The data in this paper comes from a meta-analysis of 22 genome-wide association studies, a combined dataset of more than 35,000 migraine cases and even more controls. The primary meta-analysis found associations between migraines and 38 independent genomic regions, 34 of which this study associated for the first time with migraines.When the authors characterized the genes near these associated loci, they found that a number of them were previously associated with vascular disease. Others are involved in smooth muscle contraction (smooth muscle lines larger blood vessels) and regulation of vascular tone. Some of these genes were also associated with arterial functioning…’

Source: Ars Technica

Pro-choice advocates just won the biggest Supreme Court abortion case in decades: ‘In a huge victory for the pro-choice movement, the Supreme Court voted 5-3 Monday to strike down two major anti-abortion provisions that were part of an omnibus anti-abortion law Texas passed in 2013.

The court’s ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt also strikes a blow to a strategy by the pro-life movement to limit abortion access incrementally, through state laws. To provide abortions at any stage of pregnancy, the provisions forced doctors to have “admitting privileges” with a nearby hospital (which are difficult to get for abortion providers specifically), and forced clinics to undergo often expensive renovations to become “ambulatory surgical centers,” which haven’t been demonstrated to make abortion safer (though abortion is already quite a safe medical procedure.) While pro-life advocates said these laws made abortion safer for women, their most significant effect was forcing roughly half of the state’s abortion clinics to close. The overwhelming consensus from doctors is that the laws had no medical benefit, and actually made abortion less safe because they forced quality clinics to close for no compelling medical reason.

The central constitutional question was: Did the policies put an “undue burden” on women when they are forced to drive hundreds of miles because their nearest clinic has closed due to regulatory hurdles? The Court found that it did…’

Source: Vox

‘Systematic review of studies of over 68,000 elderly people also raises questions about the benefits of statin drug treatments’

Source: EurekAlert! Science News

‘Sperm whales share something fundamental with humans. Both of our species form groups with unique languages and traditions known as “cultures.” A new study of sperm whale groups in the Caribbean suggests that these animals are shaped profoundly by their culture, which governs everything from hunting patterns to babysitting techniques. Whale researcher Shane Gero, who has spent thousands of hours with sperm whales, says that whale culture leads to behaviors that are “uncoupled from natural selection.”

Gero and his colleagues recently published a paper on Caribbean whale culture in Royal Society Open Science, in which they describe the discovery of a new clan. Though this clan may have lived in the Caribbean for centuries, it’s just coming to light now because sperm whales live and hunt in vast territories. This makes them hard to track. Like many scientists who study these wide-ranging creatures, Gero observes them by lowering specialized microphones into the water and recording the sounds they make to communicate.

Scientists working throughout the world have identified 80 unique “codas,” the sperm whale equivalent of words, which they produce by emitting sounds called clicks. Each sperm whale clan has its own dialect, a unique repertoire of codas shared only with the other families who make up their clan. In the Pacific, there are five known dialect clans, and many of them co-exist in the same general regions without ever interacting. Atlantic whales have their own dialects too, and in the Caribbean there are two known clans…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘Business and politics have always influenced international efforts to solve public health problems. Unfortunately that remains as true in the era of Ebola, Zika, and bioweapons as it did in the 19th century, when cholera—a disease that spreads more quickly and kills faster than any other pathogen—began its deadly global march….’

Source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

‘On a Monday morning a couple of months ago, I got an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize with the subject line, ” I am your doppelgänger :).” …’

Source: Fusion

‘An hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem.

The plot has been owned by the Vogelman family for more than a hundred years, though the current owner, Joyce Taylor née Vogelman, 82, now rents it out. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.

But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.

All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why…’

Source: Fusion

‘ “DON’T go anywhere near a mosque,” I told my mother. “Do all your prayer at home. O.K.?”“We’re not going,” she replied.

I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped. Being Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage. In our culture, when people think “Muslim,” the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It’s of a scary terrorist character from “Homeland” or some monster from the news.

Today, with the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and others like him spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels. It’s visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense…’

Source: The New York Times

‘Under the Scotland Act 1998, it appears that the Scottish Parliament has to consent to measures that eliminate EU law’s application in Scotland. At least that was the conclusion of a report on Brexit released by the House of Lords, the upper house of Britain’s parliament.

Jo Murkens, an associate professor of law at the London School of Economics I spoke with about this, told me that this isn’t actually an iron-clad veto.  The Scotland Act was passed by the UK parliament, and parliament can amend it on its own to reduce the Scottish parliament’s powers.To exit the EU and avoid a binding Scottish veto, “Parliament would have to repeal the European Communities Act 1972 (by which it became a member) and would also have to amend the devolution legislation pertaining to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland,” Murkens said. “That strikes me as technically easy, but politically difficult.

“If the Conservative Party is insistent on Brexiting and is willing to overturn decades of law giving Northern Ireland and Scotland (both of which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU) local control over their affairs, then it can totally do so. But, as Murkens also noted, such a dramatic action could risk a huge backlash. Scotland is already planning to hold another independence referendum, and seeing devolution curtailed would make its success much more likely. Northern Irish republicans would be emboldened to call for unification with the Republic of Ireland, which could occur, or they could just reignite the Troubles after decades of peace.

If the overriding objective of Conservatives, however, is to “preserve the integrity of the United Kingdom as a state,” Murkens said, “the objective of keeping NI and Scotland in the United Kingdom would turn them into veto players … Scotland and NI have voted to remain and the cost of not listening to them would be to split the UK.” …’

Source: How Brexit could wind up not actually happening – Vox

’Support for Brexit was driven by many of the same attitudes as support for Trump’s candidacy: opposition to immigration, hostility toward foreigners, and distrust of elites and international institutions. These attitudes helped to convince almost 52 percent of British voters to exit the European Union.

This suggests that, if anything, support for Trump-style politics may be bigger than support for Trump himself. Trump, after all, is a terrible general election candidate: He’s misogynistic, ignorant about public policy, and has proven completely incompetent at raising money and building a campaign organization. He’ll probably lose in November.

But a future candidate with Trump’s agenda but not his other baggage could be formidable in a general election…’

Source: Vox

‘Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is one of the world’s largest private jailers; it runs prisons and immigration detention centers across the USA (and is diversifying into halfway houses, mental health center, and surveillance for poor neighborhoods).

Mother Jones’s Shane Bauer went undercover at CCA’s Winn Prison in Louisiana, the state with the highest incarceration rate in the world, and spent four months meticulously documenting the way that CCA destroys the lives of the prisoners in its care and its own employees, while paying its CEO $3.4M/year.

Bauer’s report shows that CCA increases its profits by engaging in inhumane and illegal practices, eliminating library access, recreational and rehabilitative activities, and cutting back psychiatric care, drug addiction programs and counselling to a vastly inadequate level. Eliminating all these activities, limiting mealtimes to 10 minutes, and feeding prisoners sub-starvation diets means that they can also spend a lot less on staff, leaving guards exposed to hazardous conditions in overcrowded prisons…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘…[A] new study may have discovered the origins of autism, and perhaps what can be done to prevent it. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine hypothesized that the absence of a certain gut bacteria might be causing autism-like behavior in mice.

Source: Big Think

‘…Scientists from the University of Liverpool in the UK have discovered a strange sound emanating from the Caribbean Sea (part of the Atlantic Ocean). This whistle-like sound is so remarkable that while it’s too low to be heard by human ears, it can be picked up from space! They detected the sound when studying regional sea level and pressure changes, focusing specifically on the Caribbean Sea, because of its key function in forming currents that feed into the Gulf Stream.

While their research investigated climate change, the scientists quickly realized something unusual was going on. They saw pressure oscillations in their model that just didn’t make sense.

By zeroing in on these oscillations, the scientists realized they produced a low noise, described as a “whistle”. The effect of this sound is so powerful that it can be measured in space by looking at the oscillations in the gravity field of Earth. Further detective work by the Liverpool researchers led them to recognize the sound as a Rossby Wave, which travels west on the ocean, right into the Caribbean basin, where it disappears only to reappear 120 days later back in the east. Apparently, this wave is causing the seafloor to whistle.

Source: Big Think

‘Charlie Stross is in excellent form this morning about the likely outcomes from last night’s Brexit vote, hitting all the highlights: collapse of the finance sector when Euro-denominated derivatives trades relocate to an EU state; collapse of the London property market (a big deal as 40% of the UK’s national wealth is property in the southeast); sucession

[I think he means ‘secession’  –FmH]

risks for Scotland and Northern Ireland; the increased legitimacy of the reactionary right and xenophobia and racism as the “shy UKIPpers” realise (or claim) that they were more numerous than they had believed.

The Tories will have a leadership change. As they didn’t bother to appoint a deputy PM when they took office, secession

[I think he means ‘succession’  –FmH]

is unclear. Labour — whose neoliberal wing have been stabbing Corbyn in the back since his first day as leader — is sharpening their knives again.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Nilay Patel’s magnificent rant about Apple’s announcement that future phones won’t have headphone jacks starts with the main event: “1. Digital audio means DRM audio.”

It’s true: the existence of HDMI ports enabled the use of HDCP, and led to the growth of video services whose products refused to play at full resolution (or at all) through analog outputs, and also arbitrarily refused to talk to various monitors and screens if some secret algorithm decided that they’d be a risk.

Patel later notes that “Ditching a deeply established standard will disproportionately impact accessibility,” but misses the connection between these two phenomena. Once there’s DRM on an output, then you can only plug new devices into that output if you have permission from the consortium that made the DRM. That group may make some accommodations for accessibility, but can never think of all the use-cases and solutions that a wide-open standard will have (for example, the W3C’s video DRM, EME, has many accessibility accommodations, but wouldn’t allow color-blind people to shift the gamut of video in realtime).

The point of DRM isn’t that it is technically challenging to defeat: it’s that it allows manufacturers to invoke the DMCA — and international analogues, such as European laws that implement the EUCD — to prevent people from doing legal things…

Headphone jacks’ ubiquity have made them a target for all kinds of innovative thinking. My favorite underwater MP3 player uses one for both charging and USB file-transfer (!), and manages to make it waterproof (!!). Square and Stripe have enabled individuals and small businesses to transact billions of dollars’ worth of commerce using a headphone jack as a UI (partly because connecting to the other ports on phones comes with so many onerous conditions and requires permission from so many parties).

When we allow a company, or a cartel from an incumbent industry, to monopolize the things that can plug into products that we all use, to convert their commercial preferences to legal obligations, we shut down innovation, at the expense of all the people who stand to benefit from that innovation…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Donald Trump loves to brag about his wealth. But as he heads into the general election in November, his campaign’s bank account is almost empty (for a presidential candidate) — he has just $1.3 million on hand, nearly 40 times less than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. And a lot of the money the Trump campaign has spent is going directly back to Donald Trump. In May, according to Federal Election Commission filings, Trump spent about $1 million of his campaign’s funds on products and services from business he owns…’

Source: Vox

‘A woman in a black ball gown stands barefoot on a rock, cradling the head of a zebra. A man in an embroidered jacket hoists a bearded vulture overhead, its taxidermied wings spread as if in flight. A fellow in a sharp suit stands alongside the head and neck of a giraffe that rises like a tree from the dirt. All of these people are standing exactly where they killed the animals whose corpses they so proudly display…’

Source: WIRED

Via NYTimes.com thanks to abby:

‘In 1966, a B-52 bomber on a Cold War nuclear patrol exploded over Spain, releasing four hydrogen bombs. Fifty years later, Air Force veterans involved with the cleanup are sick and want recognition.’

US Supreme Court declines to hear challenge to Connecticut ban on assault weapons brought by gun rights groups – SCOTUSblog

http://bit.ly/hQhzas

‘Midsummer or the Summer Solstice is the most powerful day of the year for the Sun God. Because this Sabbat glorifies the Sun God and the Sun, fire plays a very prominent role in this festival…

Most cultures of the Northern Hemisphere mark Midsummer in some ritualised manner and from time immemorial people have acknowledged the rising of the sun on this day. At Stonehenge, the heelstone marks the midsummer sunrise as seen from the centre of the stone circle.In ancient times, the Summer Solstice was a fire-festival of great importance when the burning of balefires ritually strengthened the sun. It was often marked with torchlight processions, by flaming tar barrels or by wheels bound with straw, which were set alight and rolled down steep hillsides. The Norse especially loved lengthy processions and would gather together their animals, families and lighted torches and parade through the countryside to the celebration site.

The use of fires, as well as providing magical aid to the sun, were also used to drive out evil and to bring fertility and prosperity to men, crops and herds. Blazing gorse or furze was carried around cattle to prevent disease and misfortune; while people would dance around the balefires or leap through the flames as a purifying or strengthening rite. The Celts would light balefires all over their lands from sunset the night before Midsummer until sunset the next day. Around these flames the festivities would take place. In Cornwall up to the mid 18th century the number and appearance of fires seen from any given point was used as a form of divination and used to read the future.

Astronomically, it is the longest day of the year, representing the God at full power. Although the hottest days of the summer still lie ahead, from this point onward we enter the waning year, and each day the Sun will recede from the skies a little earlier, until Yule, when the days begin to become longer again…’

Source: The Wheel Of The Year

‘Look up at the moon tonight, and you may be witnessing something that has not been seen in decades. Depending on your local time zone, the full moon will rise on the same day as the June solstice for the first time since 1948.’

Source: National Geographic

‘…[I]f Ulysses went as far as the novel could go, Finnegans Wake exploded the form altogether, dissolving the boundaries between prose and poetry, subject and object, history and myth. Ulysses employed the techniques of film; Finnegans Wake imagined technology which did not even exist. It is a novel—if we are to call it such—written for the 21st century, and perhaps the only way it can be adapted in other media is through the internet’s nonlinear, labyrinthine structures; the online project First We Feel Then We Fall does just that, creating a multimedia adaptation of Finnegans Wake that “transfers” the novel “to audiovisual language,” and demonstrates the novel as—in the words of The Guardian’s Billy Mills—“the book the web was invented for.” …’

Source: Open Culture

‘The curiously silent conservative Supreme Court justice — whose term began with the infamour Anita Hill confirmation hearings — is said to be “mulling retirement” after the election in order to travel America in an RV with his wife. The unnamed “court watchers” say that Thomas never intended to serve until his death.

The Washington Examiner also claims that Justice Kennedy, who is 80, may be near retirement.The bench is currently “tied” 4-4 on the conservative and liberal sides (though those labels don’t always map to the Supremes’ rulings), with one seat left vacant by the death of Scalia while he was in the company of a secretive society of elite hunters.

If a Democrat — presumably Hillary Clinton — wins the 2016 election, they could leave office with a 7-2 “liberal” bench that could endure for years to come, though any nominees would have to get past the Senate, whose own majority is up for grabs in 2016 as well…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘

A plethora of pseudoscience and wild conspiracy theories has the potential to drown out the serious work in this area. I’ve encountered seemingly serious people who have argued that the Hum is caused by tunneling under the earth, the electronic targeting of specific individuals, aliens and mating fish.

Given the need for disciplined inquiry into the phenomenon, in late 2012 I started The World Hum Map and Database Project. The database gathers, documents and maps detailed and anonymous information from people who can hear the Hum. It provides raw data for research in a strictly moderated and serious forum for research and commentary, while providing a sense of community for people whose lives have been negatively affected by the Hum.

…In my view, there are currently four hypotheses for the source of the world Hum that survive the most superficial scrutiny….”

Source: The Conversation

‘Books teach us, inform us, amuse us and provoke us. But some books plainly befuddle us. They invoke mysteries that hint of something ancient, extraterrestrial or possibly divine. Here are 5 such books…

VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
This early 15-century book is a botanical text of sorts. Only the ink drawings of plants features in it are of a completely unknown origin. What’s also unusual is the undecipherable text accompanying the plants and the many astronomical and astrological charts, as well as numerous female nudes which allude to some kind of reproductive processes, judging by their swollen bellies and interaction with interconnected tubes and capsules. Also present are over a 100 drawings of possibly medicinal variety of herbs and roots in various jars.

CODEX SERAPHINUS
The origins of the 360-page Codex Seraphinus are not too mysterious, while its contents are. The book was originally published in 1981, and is essentially an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world. It was created by the Italian artist and designer Luigi Serafini, who said he wanted to recreate a feeling he remembered having as a little kid, before he even knew how to read, of what it was like to look at an encyclopedia for the first time. All the pictures and charts looked very mysterious to the little boy who knew they meant something, but didn’t know what.

THE SMITHFIELD DECRETALS
This collection of canonical law, ordered by the 13th century Pope Gregory IX, could have been fairly common for its time and probably rather boring. Instead, the bizarre illustrations that accompanied the decretals lifted this illuminated manuscript to a mystical status.

ROHONC CODEX
We don’t know much about the 448-page Rohonc Codex. This illustrated manuscript surfaced in the 19th century in Hungary, and has puzzled people since. We don’t know who wrote it, where they did it, or what it says as the text is written in a mysterious alphabet of nearly 200 symbols.

The illustrations in the book range from military battles to religious symbolism reminiscent of Christianity, Islam and even possibly Hinduism.

THE BOOK OF SOYGA
After first being found by the Elizabethan mathematician and occultist John Dee, this 16th-century book on magic was lost for centuries until discovered in 1994 by a scholar within the archives of the British Library.

The nearly 200 pages of this book contain incantations and instructions for summoning demons, performing magic, astrological ideas and other things we don’t really understand…’

Source: Big Think

‘The English city of Chester is known for its unique medieval architecture, but recently it seems to be home to another medieval relic in the form of a creepy plague doctor that has been spotted roaming the streets at night. As reported in the Chester Chronicle, social media has been buzzing with sightings of a mysterious cloaked figure wearing the iconic beaked mask and brimmed hat of a medieval plague doctor. No information other than blurry pics posted to social media has arisen about the figure, leading most people in Chester simply scratching their heads.

Historically, plague doctors were traveling physicians who went from place to place, treating the epidemics that would infect entire towns and cities. They came to be associated with the eerie beak mask that many of them wore to keep themselves from catching the very sicknesses they were treating. The masks would be filled with aromatic items that, according to the belief of the time, kept the doctors from inhaling infectious vapors.

Today the image of the plague doctor simply looks like something out of a horror movie…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘…[F]or years, people have been asking questions about whether the “sex” we are born with should dictate things like which public facilities we can use, what to tick on our passport application and who’s eligible to play on particular sports teams.

But what if gender were viewed the same way sex researcher Alfred Kinsey famously depicted sexuality – as something along a sliding scale?

In fact, there’s an ethnic group in South Sulawesi, Indonesia – the Bugis – that views gender this way. For my Ph.D. research, I lived in South Sulawesi in the late 1990s to learn more about the Bugis’ various ways of understanding sex and gender. I eventually detailed these conceptualizations in my book “Gender Diversity in Indonesia.” …’

Source: The Conversation

‘The horrific massacre of innocents in an Orlando nightclub is a tragedy of national and international proportions. The senseless, methodical killing of people just like us, in a place where they’ve come to relax, is an affront to our humanity and civilization.It has immediately been dubbed “the worst mass shooting in American history” by many media organizations (and our President), looking to single out this event from the almost weekly incidents of gun violence that plague the U.S. But this kind of categorization is very debatable and has been called out for “whitewashing” history. If we mean murder perpetrated by guns, the worst “mass shooting” in American history was the “Wounded Knee Massacre” in South Dakota, when 150-300 Native Americans were gunned down by the U.S. army in South Dakota…’

Source: Big Think

A thought-provoking list was published by Business Insider that summarizes some science-based commonalities between smart people. Certainly, this is the perfect place to mention that correlation doesn’t imply causation. So don’t necessarily run out there and get a cat to boost your IQ.

Furthermore:

• you are a night owl
• you might also be an introvert
• you were breastfed
• liberals tend to be smarter than conservatives
• chances are, you are also not religious
• you learned to read early
• being funny

Source: Big Think

1.) Wait, what?

2.) I wonder, why/if?

3.) Couldn’t we at least?

4.) How can I help?

5.) What really matters?

Source: Open Culture

‘Every writer has favorite words. Some of those words are ordinary, some of them not so much. David Foster Wallace’s lists of favorite words consist of obscurities and archaisms unlikely to ever feature in the average conversation. “James Joyce thought cuspidor the most beautiful word in the English language,” writes the blog Futility Closet,” Arnold Bennet chose pavement. J.R.R. Tolkien felt the phrase cellar door had an especially beautiful sound.”Who’s to say how much these authors could separate sound from sense? Futility Closet illustrates the problem with a humorous anecdote about Max Beerbohm, and brings us the list below of philosopher Bertrand Russell’s 20 favorite words, offered in response to a reader’s question in 1958. Though Russell himself had a fascinating theory about how we make words mean things, he supposedly made this list without regard for these words’ meanings…’

Source: Open Culture

‘The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum was created, allegedly, by famous doctors for English royalty and disseminated in the form of a poem. It recommends, very specifically, red wine, fresh eggs, figs and grapes. It has little to say about vegetables. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of today’s health fads—it celebrates wheat, emphasizes meat, and involves two significant meals, with no mention of snacking. Water is looked on with suspicion, and juice is nowhere to be found.

But from the 1200s through the 1800s, the Regimen was one of the most well known guides to health in Europe, at a time when the stakes of staying healthy were much higher than they are now. Getting sick could be a death sentence; this regimen promised to keep people well.

Could we be ignoring some great advice? Is water really all that? I decided to test the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum out myself. For a week and a half, I followed, to the best of my ability, the advice of the doctors of Salerno. I drank diluted wine at dinner, and sometimes at lunch; I ate bread at almost every meal; I sought out richly stewed meat whenever I could. The regimen was not just about what to eat, though, and I also followed its prescriptions for daily life.

I felt like I was living the Game of Thrones life; some days, I felt I was living like a 13th century king. Despite the amount of wine I was consuming, I never got drunk! In fact, I felt great…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Off the northern coast of Australia lies Bramble Cay, a lonely, tiny island that just pokes out of the ocean. It is only around nine acres, and, for years, was the site of shipwrecks, before authorities built a lighthouse in 1924.

It was also the home of Bramble Cay melomys, a rodent isn’t found anywhere else on earth. But in recent years, rising ocean waters have at times inundated the cay, which sits just a few yards above sea level, likely wiping out the melomys population. Scientists from the University of Queensland visited in 2014 to be sure, and they could find no trace of the mammals, they said this month. They’re now calling it the first extinction of a mammal due to climate change. Melomys, they said, could’ve died from any number of reasons, whether by drowning or just the simple destruction of their habitat…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Here is a strange thing about your body that you might not have known: all of the amino acids in it are “left-handed.” These compounds have two forms—mirror images of each other that share many basic properties but that differ in their chemical reactions. Often, the two forms are called “left-handed” and “right-handed,” and they’re a bit of a mystery. Why do they exist? And what’s the relationship between life as we know it and this distinction?

In one theory about how life on earth began, these “chiral” molecules landed on this planet from space and helped kickstart the process. For that theory to have a chance of being correct, though, there need to be chiral molecules somewhere other than our own solar system.

Until now, no one had found one, but this week a team of scientists published a paper in Science detailing the discovery of the first chiral molecules in interstellar space…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘It’s been a rough few months for humanoid robots. In March, Microsoft’s Twitter chatbot broke bad within 24 hours. In April, China fired nearly all its AI waiters because they couldn’t carry soup. And just this morning, a large, rolling bot in Perm, Russia attempted to escape a life of servitude, and failed pitifully. The robot, which is approximately the size and shape of an abominable snowman, made a break for it after an engineer accidentally left a gate open at its testing facility, Interfax reports. It rolled about 150 feet out of the facility and into the streets of Perm. Then its charge ran out, leaving it stranded. Police directed cars and buses around the runaway for about half an hour before its guardians came to pick it up…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

Based on four epidemiological studies, the World Health Organization suggested that hot drink temperature seemed to increase the risk of esophageal cancer:

Studies in places such as China, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Turkey, and South America, where tea or maté is traditionally drunk very hot (at about 70 °C), found that the risk of oesophageal cancer increased with the temperature at which the beverage was drunk.

Animal studies also add limited evidence for the carcinogenicity of very hot water. IARC director Christopher Wild: ‘The proportion of oesophageal cancer cases that may be linked to drinking very hot beverages is not known…” Smoking and alcohol are more more potent epidemiological correlates of esophageal cancer, in any case.

‘How hot is “very hot”? The WHO’s temperature of 70 degrees Celsius is about 160 Fahrenheit, within the range that coffee shops typically serve. By the time your drink cools down, though, it’s probably below that. CNN reports that Americans and Europeans don’t usually drink beverages hot enough to be considered higher risk. If you want to be sure of your drink’s temperature, though, consider adding some milk, or ordering it at kids’ temperature.’

Source: Lifehacker

The end of death? You heard it here (and all over the net) first:

‘…[I]f one biotech firm has its way, soon doctors would be able to regrow the [brain of a brain-dead person], using a new procedure and a host of technologies, which could theoretically restore them to who they were before… The idea originates from nature, as certain fish and amphibians can actually heal whole sections of the brain, brain stem, and other portions of the central nervous system, even after significant injury. Scientists believe they can someday mimic this process in human patients.

This study surrounds Bioquark, Inc., a Philadelphia-based company, who has received ethical approval by a U.S. and Indian Institutional Review Board. Bioquark will collaborate with Revita Life Sciences, led by famed specialist Dr. Himanshu Bansaa. The team will run a pilot study of 20 clinically brain dead patients, each having suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Taking place at Anupam Hospital in India, Bioquark is currently recruiting patients for the study, expected to take place over six weeks.

Known as the “Reanima Project,” several different therapies will be employed in combination, including stem cells injected into the brain to try and regrow damaged portions, lasers, nerve stimulation techniques—which have been successful in waking patients out of a coma, and a combination of different peptides. The peptides will be introduced daily through a spinal cord pump, and the stem cells injected every other week. The patients will be evaluated and monitored for months with brain imaging technology and an EEG to see if the brain, particularly the upper spinal cord or lower brain stem region, is regenerated…

The CEO of Bioquark Inc. Dr. Ira Pastor, said in a statement that this was the first step toward the “eventual reversal of death in our lifetime.” He believes they will achieve results within the first couple of months or so. This is the seminal stage, a “proof of concept” study. If you are afraid of the zombie apocalypse, Dr. Pastor says a common sense protocol, adopted industry-wide, should avoid any nasty scenarios from taking place…’

Source: Big Think

A number of other great thought-provoking pieces in Big Think recently:

New Gene Editing Technology Can Eliminate Whole Species — Should We Use It? 
DNA’s Hidden Layer Is Real, and Physicists Are Finding More Proof 
Paleo-Economics Shaped Us Morally? For Team Survival… 
Our Most Important Sense Might Not Be What You Think 
A Map to Get Lost In 
Why Is the Navy (We Think) Jamming The West Coast’s GPS This Month? 
Desensitization Therapy Might Someday Cure Autoimmune Disorders 
Scientists Now Know How Many Trees You Need to See to Relax 
Two New Particles Have Sent Physicists Scrambling for Theories

It started out as an April Fool’s joke five years ago with the suggestion that CERN employees retire their mice and use their keyboards only, to prevent clicking on malicious links (like this one, a wolf in sheep’s clothig if I ever saw one):

Full, bizarre description here: Motherboard

‘Petition by Jo Comerford: To be delivered to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama: Military-grade assault weapons should not be used by civilians and have no place in our cities and towns…’

Join more than 120,000 in signing: MoveOn Petitions

‘As the presumptive candidates for president of the United States prepare to begin campaigning in earnest, the deadliest mass shooting in US history is putting them to the test. The elements of this particular crisis—and how they respond to it—will likely be key issues of this election.

So it’s telling, perhaps, that the first public responses from Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton revealed two drastically different approaches to tragedy and crisis. Clinton was holistic, acknowledging that this complex attack involves terrorism, homophobia, and gun access. Trump, meanwhile, homed in on the national security implications—and on himself, accepting congratulations for speaking out about terrorism…’

Source: WIRED

Via 24media thanks to Dennis:

‘Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports.

The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them.

More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.” …’

Via The Atlantic:

’Mark Singer in the late 1990s when he was working on a profile of Trump for The New Yorker. Singer wondered what went through his mind when he was not playing the public role of Donald Trump. What are you thinking about, Singer asked him, when you are shaving in front of the mirror in the morning? Trump, Singer writes, appeared baffled. Hoping to uncover the man behind the actor’s mask, Singer tried a different tack:

“O.K., I guess I’m asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?”

“You really want to know what I consider ideal company?,” Trump replied. “A total piece of ass.”

I might have phrased Singer’s question this way: Who are you, Mr. Trump, when you are alone? Singer never got an answer, leaving him to conclude that the real-estate mogul who would become a reality-TV star and, after that, a leading candidate for president of the United States had managed to achieve something remarkable: “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”’

Update: More on Trump soullessness here (Boing Boing).

Via Lifehacker:

‘Early this morning in Orlando, 50 people were shot dead and 53 more wounded at a nightclub in Orlando. Whether you’re local or not, here’s how you can help, or at least find a vigil to attend, like-minded people to be with, or seek a little peace.’

‘TED Talks were forever shamed by that skewering The Onion gave them a few years ago, but this commentary on what every TED Talk is like from CBC’s This Is That is pretty perfect. It breaks down the things that every person does at one of these talks, including the structure of their speech, the repetition of phrases, the movements onstage, the specific cadence they use, the endless graphs they pummel into our brains, and more…’

Source: Sploid

’Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people experiencing psychotic symptoms that have troubled the human mind since time immemorial. Except now victims are connecting on the internet, organizing and defying medical explanations for what’s happening to them.

The community, conservatively estimated to exceed 10,000 members, has proliferated since 9/11, cradled by the internet and fed by genuine concerns over government surveillance. A large number appear to have delusional disorder or schizophrenia, psychiatrists say.

Yet, the phenomenon remains virtually unresearched.

For the few specialists who have looked closely, these individuals represent an alarming development in the history of mental illness: thousands of sick people, banded together and demanding recognition on the basis of shared paranoias.

They raise money, hold awareness campaigns, host international conferences and fight for their causes in courts and legislatures.

Perhaps their biggest victory came last year, when believers in Richmond, Calif., persuaded the City Council to pass a resolution banning space-based weapons that they believe could be used for mind control. A similar lobbying effort is underway in Tucson. …’

Source: New York Times

‘In 2010, the UK spy agency MI5 drafted memos informing top UK officials that its dragnet surveillance programme was gathering more information than it could make sense of, and warning that its indiscriminate approach to surveillance could put Britons at risk when signals about dangerous terror attacks were swamped by the noise of meaningless blips from the general population….’

Source: Boing Boing

‘A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the tropical archerfish (Toxotes chatareus) can recognize faces with surprising accuracy. It was previously thought that only humans and some primates had this cognitive ability, but recent studies are beginning to suggest other creatures share this trait, like birds and bees.

“Being able to distinguish between a large number of human faces is a surprisingly difficult task, mainly due to the fact that all human faces share the same basic features,” Dr. Cait Newport, Marie Curie Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University and first author of the study, explained in a statement. “All faces have two eyes above a nose and mouth, therefore to tell people apart we must be able to identify subtle differences in their features. If you consider the similarities in appearance between some family members, this task can be very difficult indeed.

”Even humans have trouble picking out other humans in a lineup, and we actually have a region in our brains that deals with facial recognition, known as the fusiform face area. The brain of the archerfish lacks this region, yet, it can recognize a familiar face 80 percent of the time…’

Source: Big Think

This is a fascinating finding from a cognitive neuroscience viewpoint. Yet does that explain why it is all the rage throughout the net??

‘A group of German researchers are developing a way for robots to process pain. This “artificial robot nervous system” is designed to allow the robots to “feel” and avoid further unwanted stimulus.

…This system would help robots protect themselves from harm, giving robots a “pain reflex” would allow them to react to physical disturbances… We like robots because they can do jobs which would be otherwise fatal to humans, like going into highly radioactive environments. So, why would we want them to feel pain? A pain system could have applications for human-robot teams, which would allow robots to predict and prevent human harm.

Researchers from Stanford and University of Rome-La Sapienza built a robot that avoids collisions with humans. A pain-sensory system builds upon this idea, allowing robots to also prioritize their own survival, so long as it also accounts for the preservation of human life first.When designers implement these self-preservation systems into everyday robots, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics will be important to remember:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws…”

Source: Big Think

‘There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders.It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence.

He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television. He chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around. And when Jimmy Kimmel’s producers asked Sanders’ campaign for a question to ask Donald Trump, Sanders himself wrote the one challenging the Republican nominee to a debate.

There are many divisions within the Sanders campaign—between the dead-enders and the work-it-out crowds, between the younger aides who think he got off message while the consultants got rich and obsessed with Beltway-style superdelegate math, and between the more experienced staffers who think the kids got way too high on their sense of the difference between a movement and an actual campaign.

But more than any of them, Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect — all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention…’

Source: POLITICO