‘A Japanese woman peers at you through a YouTube clip, whispering words in Japanese and English that are barely audible. In some videos she taps different materials gently; in others, she makes sounds with traditional Japanese instruments. Welcome to the quirky world of Japanese Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)—the phenomenon of inducing pleasurable chills and shivers in responsive listeners via sounds. Since 2014, YouTuber Yukino Yumijuku, who was recently featured in a Japan Times article on the rise of ASMR in Japan, has created 78 YouTube videos associated with the phenomenon for her channel “Japanese ASMR.” …’

Source: Motherboard

If bees disappear, so will all of life’s modern luxuries. ‘Approximately every third bit of food we eat exists because of honey bee pollination…’

Source: Motherboard

‘…former NASA employee James Oberg, calmly explaining what is really going on. Oberg worked at Mission Control in the late ’90s, and then became a space journalist and historian. A few years ago, he picked up a new hobby: taking UFOs seriously. Unlike other debunkers, Oberg is less into dismissing theories offhand (an activity he calls “stomping on dormice”) and more interested in figuring out exactly why people react so strongly to outer space images and footage.

To do this, he has combed through decades of supposed UFO sightings, reading eyewitness testimony and cross-referencing it with mission logs. In the process, he’s come to an interesting conclusion: human senses, evolved in and trained on (relatively) slow-moving objects, certain light conditions, and an atmosphere, get thrown into a tizzy when those conditions change. “Our sensory system is functioning absolutely perfectly for Earth conditions,” says Oberg. “But we’re still a local civilization. Moving beyond our neighborhood has been visually confusing.”

Here are three outer space phenomena that Oberg says tend to bamboozle the human eye, and the truth behind them…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

But I want to believe…

‘In August 2014, workers completed the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, as the final part of the 210-foot-high (64-meter-high) Glines Canyon Dam was dismantled on the Elwha River in northwestern Washington State.The multistage project began in 2011 with the blessing of the U.S. National Park Service, which administers the surrounding Olympic National Park. The goal was to remove unneeded, outdated dams and restore a natural river system, with presumed benefits for fish and other wildlife.

Indeed, salmon have already returned to the Elwha after nearly a century of absence, and other fish and marine creatures are thriving.  But the restoration hasn’t just been about the river channel itself, says Anne Shaffer, a marine biologist with the nonprofit Coastal Watershed Institute in nearby Port Angeles, Washington. (Watch spectacular time-lapse video of another Northwest dam coming down.) Shaffer has been working on the Elwha system since the early 1990s, with a particular focus on what’s called the “nearshore environment.” This is an ecological zone of aquatic habitat along the shoreline that “offers refuge and feeding areas for fish and other organisms that helps them transition from freshwater to marine habitat,” says Shaffer. Nearshore environments include deltas and estuary systems near the mouths of rivers as well as seagrass beds in shallow water…’

Source: National Geographic

‘Add this to the list of existential fears that keep you up at night: the universe appears to be expanding faster than we thought. A lot faster.That’s according to new, highly precise measurements of the distance between 19 faraway galaxies acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope. The new numbers indicate that the rate of expansion of our universe (the so-called “Hubble constant”) is approximately 45.5 miles per second per megaparsec…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Though there are important differences, the parallels between Reagan’s political life and Trump’s are downright chilling, from their media careers to the way that the press and their own party establishment viewed them.

Both positioned themselves as outsiders (Reagan, absurdly, ran successfully as a political outsider while he was the sitting president of the USA, and painted his opponent as the Beltway insider). Both offered economic platforms that didn’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny. Both lied like crazy, about everything, and refused to answer any press questions that called them on this. Both are masters of deflection overall, brilliant at moving the focus away from their radioactively obvious shortcomings to the places where they shone.

Of course, both also had careers in forgettable, modestly successful media properties. Both had checkered pasts in which they dabbled in Democratic politics and painted that opportunism as a reason for Conservatives to vote for them. Both managed to court evangelicals despite their divorces.

Reagan’s slogan? “Let’s make America great again.” …’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Daily Beast explains a pick so offbeat one almost assumes he must be the rumor’s source. As Bloomberg Politics reported Tuesday evening, [William Kristol] appears to be going with the most devastating pick of all: National Review blogger David French. A conservative thinker with such strong name recognition he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

He does, however, fit the fan-fiction archetype of a Bill Kristol candidate.According to his bio, French is a constitutional lawyer who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. He lives in solid-red Tennessee with his wife and three kids. He once contributed to a New York Times best-selling book about fighting ISIS.

“To say that he would be a better and a more responsible president than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump,” Kristol recently wrote of French, “is to state a truth that would become self-evident as more Americans got to know him.”

French’s obscurity is matched by the bland neoconservatism of his positions: if you’re gay, feminist, think Black lives matter or simply a millennial, he’s probably got a negative thing or two to say about you. But he’s also fabulously insecure, as noted by Politico’s Kevin Robillard, insisting that his wife not communicate with men by phone or email lest she encounter the “ghosts of boyfriends past.” …’

Source: Boing Boing

Though he “harmed American interests,” says Eric Holder, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks “were also a public service.”

Source: Boing Boing

‘Why make it harder to receive treatment than to receive a dangerous drug in the first place?’

Source: The Conversation

‘While still speculative, new hypothesis offers some sensible explanations to the disease… The findings, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, suggest that Alzheimer’s may result from the brain’s effort to fight off infections. While that hypothesis is controversial and highly speculative at this point, it could dramatically alter the way researchers and doctors work to treat and prevent the degenerative disease…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘Over the past 60 years, the population of cephalopods—octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish—has been steadily growing. This is particularly remarkable because many types of marine life have been dying out as carbon levels in the oceans rise, making the water more acidic. So even as numbers of crabs, sea stars, and coral reefs are shrinking, the tentacled creatures of the deep are thriving.

Writing in Current Biology, a large group of marine biologists describe how they discovered this trend. Looking at the past 61 years of fisheries data from all major oceans, they examined numbers of cephalopods that are bycatch, or accidentally caught along with target fish. Using these numbers as a proxy for cephalopod populations as a whole, they discovered a steady increase over the decades, across all cephalopod species. The question is why.

The researchers say it’s likely a function of a cephalopod’s ability to adapt quickly. “These ecologically and commercially important invertebrates may have benefited from a changing ocean environment,” they write. Most cephalopods have very short lifespans and are able to change their behavior very quickly during their lifespans. Indeed, octopuses are tool-users who can learn quickly, leading to many daring escapes from tanks in labs as well as brilliant forms of camouflage at the bottom of the ocean. All these characteristics add up to a set of species who can change on the fly, as their environments are transformed.

If trends continue, cephalopods may be among the species who are poised to survive a mass extinction in the oceans, leading to a future marine ecosystem ruled by tentacles…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘…Jake had spent his life respecting the Earth, and he didn’t want his final act to harm it. He was also opposed to the death care industry — a $20 billion-a-year business notorious for preying on people at the lowest points in their lives. It’s an industry increasingly controlled by a single entity called Service Corporation International (SCI), a company with 20,000 employees and a market capitalization of $4 billion.

Jake decided on something different: a natural burial. He wanted to go back to the burial traditions humans embraced for thousands of years, before the development of chemical embalming and steel-lined caskets. There would be no formaldehyde, no coffin, just a simple shroud and a hole in ground.”

…Natural burial is perfectly legal in the United States, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Jake’s friends and family couldn’t just dig a hole on his land in Port Angeles and leave him there to rest — although they did think about it, Tristan says. Natural burial requires a cemetery willing to take the body, which can be difficult to find. Because so many cemeteries are owned by SCI, a company that pushes clients to take the full package — embalming, concrete-lined vaults, etc. — there are only a handful of natural cemeteries in all of Washington state…’

Source: Vox

‘IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating…’

Source: Alain de Botton, The New York Times

‘Despite unexplained mechanism, the new treatment will be easy to try in humans…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘Certainly, you likely don’t believe in the possibility of demonic possession and think it’s the stuff of Hollywood movies. But it may also be that you don’t really know how to recognize being possessed. To remedy this, one of the world’s leading exorcist’s just shared some of his knowledge.Father Cipriano de Meo, who has been an exorcist since 1952, revealed to the Italian Catholic News Agency that the key to telling whether you’re possessed or suffer from some other (possibly mental) illness is in your reaction to the exorcist himself and the prayers being offered…’

Source: Big Think

‘‘Could you recover a murder victim’s last sight of their killer by extracting it from the retina? Little more than a century ago, forensic scientists thought it might be possible. After all, in 1877 physiologist Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne was able to develop a simple image from an albino rabbit’s dissected eyeball. (Above, the two images on the right come from rabbits who stared at two different windows. The left shows just nerves and blood vessels.) …’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Few atheists know the Bible as intimately as Dan Barker. Few, after all, can profess to have begun their careers as fundamentalist Christian preachers. Currently co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an American non-profit organisation, Barker was a self-proclaimed “extremist” for 19 years, until he renounced the faith.

Given how vehemently the 66-year-old now defends a life free of any supernatural authority, I ask him if he regrets the consequences that his Christian ministry may have had on people he would now describe as vulnerable. “Yes, I do regret a lot of it,” he says with candour. “I would counsel people to pray for healing. That’s dangerous. That’s harmful. People die from that. And I acted irresponsibly with my health, because I knew that God was going to take care of me.” This is a window that, once opened, is difficult to close. Barker reels off multiple instances in which he believes that he seriously damaged the lives of his parishioners.

In Arizona, a woman approached him, looking for faith healing to cure her of an illness. The two prayed together and when, inevitably, it did nothing, he said, “Let it be unto you according to your faith” (a reference to a line originally found in Matthew 8:13). “In other words,” Barker says, “it was her fault. She walked out of that meeting not only not healed but feeling chastised. It’s not a kind way to treat another human being.”

In his mid-twenties, he counselled a woman who was struggling with an abusive husband. Barker told her to persevere with him because, as the Bible says, he would eventually see the light. “So I counselled a woman to stay in an abusive relationship, because the Bible says that you are married for life.” What would he say if she approached him with the same problem now? “I would tell her to run for the nearest shelter and get out of there.”

Barker may have left religion behind but he is still a preacher of sorts. His latest book, God: the Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, draws on his knowledge of scripture to attack the Bible’s claim to moral authority. If the title sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a phrase that Richard Dawkins uses to introduce the second chapter of The God Delusion. There, he accuses the God of the Old Testament of 19 character flaws, among them jealousy, sadomasochism, caprice and ethnic cleansing. In a foreword to Barker’s book, Dawkins writes that The God Delusion’s reputation for stridency owes much to this one sentence…’

Source: New Humanist

‘The demonstration began on the afternoon of May 21, 1946, at a secret laboratory tucked into a canyon some three miles from Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atom bomb. Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist, was showing his colleagues how to bring the exposed core of a nuclear weapon nearly to the point of criticality, a tricky operation known as “tickling the dragon’s tail.” The core, sitting by itself on a squat table, looked unremarkable—a hemisphere of dull metal with a nub of plutonium sticking out of its center, the whole thing warm to the touch because of its radioactivity. It had been quickly molded into shape after the bombing of Nagasaki, to be used in another attack on Japan, then reallocated when it turned out not to be needed for the war effort. At that time, Slotin was perhaps the world’s foremost expert on handling dangerous quantities of plutonium. He had helped assemble the first atomic weapon, barely a year earlier…

Slotin’s procedure was simple. He would lower a half-shell of beryllium, called the tamper, over the core, stopping just before it was snugly seated. The tamper would reflect back the neutrons that were shooting off the plutonium, jump-starting a weak and short-lived nuclear chain reaction, on which the physicists could then gather data. Slotin held the tamper in his left hand. In his right hand, he held a long screwdriver, which he planned to wedge between the two components, keeping them apart. As he began the slow and painstaking process of lowering the tamper, one of his colleagues, Raemer Schreiber, turned away to focus on other work, expecting that the experiment would be uninteresting until several more moments had passed. But suddenly he heard a sound behind him: Slotin’s screwdriver had slipped, and the tamper had dropped fully over the core. When Schreiber turned around, he saw a flash of blue light and felt a wave of heat on his face…’

Source: The New Yorker

//player.cnevids.com/embedjs/5176e89e68f9daff42000013/video/573f9b89ba4aa1100e000029.js

‘YOU KNOW THAT hermit crab you had in elementary school? The one you so rudely neglected? Well, it told its cousin on you—its 9-pound, three-foot-wide cousin the coconut crab. This thing has everything: wildly powerful claws, the ability to invade your nightmares, and a penchant for coconuts and sometimes kittens…’

Source: WIRED

‘Despite candidate’s rejection of climate change, project acknowledges reality.’

Source: Ars Technica

‘The history of why Q is almost always followed by U is fascinating, and dates back to when the Normans invaded England in 1066. Before that, English didn’t even have a Q; it used “cw” to replicate the sound. After the invasion, though, the spelling of English was changed to match the French ways: “cw” was replaced with “qu.”So can we blame it on the French? Not exactly, because they got that spelling from the Romans … who actually got it from the Etruscans, who actually got it from the Phoenicians…’

Source: Sploid

‘Tonight (05/22/16), Mars will be the brightest that it has been in the past 10 years. The red planet will be so bright that you’ll be able to see it in tonight’s sky without needing a telescope.Mars now resides opposite the sun in Earth’s sky, because on this date we are passing between it and the sun in our smaller, faster orbit.Now opposite the sun, Mars rises in the east around sunset, climbs to its highest point in the sky at midnight, and sets in the west around sunrise.Set a reminder on your phone so you won’t forget to go outside after dark tonight and look towards the East for your chance to see Mars…’

Source: Gadgeteer

I know this was about last night but you still have a chance…

‘William J. Hager of Port St. Lucie, Florida is an 86 year old man who confessed to shooting his 76 year old wife, Carolyn Hager, in her sleep, because the couple could no longer afford her medications, leaving her in pain and wanting to die.America is the only industrialized country in the world without universal health care…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘If you were to ask a betting astronomer where we will find life in the Solar System, they would almost certainly put their money on Europa, the icy satellite of Jupiter. And according to the latest study, the odds are very much in their favor…’

Source: IFLScience

Via Atlas Obscura: ‘Beards—once associated strictly with hermits and wizards—have become one of the hottest fashion accessories for men in the past few years, with celebrities, athletes, and style-conscious men around the globe growing, grooming, and styling their facial hair to match the latest trends. But despite their current popularity, beards remain deeply divisive and this week, one British barber and businessman has floated a radical proposal to discourage hirsute faces, or at least make some money off the men who refuse to renounce them.’

‘A remarkable case report describes the brain activity in a man at the moment that he underwent a revelatory experience.According to the authors, Israeli researchers Arzy and Schurr, the man was 46 years old. He was Jewish, but he had never been especially religious. His supernatural experience occured in hospital where he was undergoing tests to help treat his right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a condition which he had suffered from for forty years. As part of the testing procedure, the patient stopped taking his anticonvulsant medication. Here’s how the authors describe what happened…’

Source: Neuroskeptic

‘Interviews reveal unwelcome advances, a shrewd reliance on ambition, and unsettling workplace conduct over decades.’ Via NYTimes.com

‘…[The] argument that legal killing helps stop illegal killing continues to be made around the world. The United States still asserts it when it comes to grizzly bears. Both Sweden and Finland use it as a justification for controlled wolf hunting. “The philosophy that underpins wolf management is that hunting them makes them more socially acceptable to people,” says Doug Smith, senior wildlife biologist at Yellowstone National Park.But now a new study examining wolf population growth rates in Michigan and Wisconsin shows that the opposite is true. Government-sanctioned culling actually results in more illegal killings, scientists report this week in the journal Proceedings Royal Society B…’

Source: National Geographic

‘Acetaminophen, the most common drug ingredient in the United States, found in over 600 medicines like Tylenol, has been found to reduce empathy in those who take it. According to a new study, the painkiller reduces the ability to relate to the physical and social pains experienced by others. “We don’t know why acetaminophen is having these effects, but it is concerning,” said Baldwin Way, the study’s senior co-author. “Empathy is important. If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse’s feelings.” …’

Source: Big Think

‘We know that mixing sodium with water causes awesome explosions. We know that skipping rocks across a lake is very probably one of the funnest things you can do outdoors. Next time, we’re all bringing a pound of sodium to the lake..’

Source: Gizmodo

‘One of Yellowstone National Park’s most famous residents has been killed.Officials from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks announced last week that “Scarface” the grizzly bear was shot by a hunter last fall, just outside of the park’s boundary near Gardiner, Montana.The species is covered by federal protection in 48 states in the U.S. under the Endangered Species Act. As such, wildlife officials and federal police have begun an investigation into who killed the bear…’

Source: IFLScience

‘The debate over what killed Chris McCandless, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering and occasionally flaring for more than two decades now. Shortly after the first edition of Into the Wild was published in January 1996, University of Alaska chemists Edward Treadwell and Thomas Clausen shot down my theory that the cause of McCandless’s death was a toxic alkaloid contained in the seeds of the Eskimo potato plant, Hedysarum alpine, also known as wild potato…’

Writer Jon Krakauer becomes an organic chemist to pin down a new theory.

Source: Medium

‘…[T]he quest for inflated egos… is misguided and largely pointless. There’s nothing wrong with being confident… The trouble is how we try to achieve high self-regard. Often, it’s by undermining others or comparing our achievements to those around us. That’s not just unsustainable… it can also lead to narcissism or depressive bouts during hard times…’

Source: Business Insider

‘The scourge of puppies, babies, and robotic vacuums is no longer a problem for robotic cockroaches. Researchers at UC Berkeley have taught this pair of VelociRoACHes to cooperate and help each other tackle stairs using a tiny magnetic winch and old-fashioned teamwork…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘US House Speaker Paul Ryan has said he cannot currently support Donald Trump as Republican presidential nominee… Mr Trump, he said, will get the nomination because “he earned it, he deserved it. He won the vote”. Former presidents George W Bush and George H W Bush also said Thursday that they will not endorse the controversial presumptive nominee…’

Source: BBC News

…uncharacteristically sound judgment from Dubya!

‘The introduction of the Psychoactive Substances Act was originally due to come into force on 6 April, but was delayed following claims its definition of “psychoactivity” was not practically enforceable by the police and prosecutors. The legislation is designed to outlaw the trade in legal highs, synthetic chemicals that imitate the effects of traditional illicit drugs such as cannabis and ecstasy, but does not make their possession outside a prison a criminal offence.

The introduction of similar legislation in Ireland triggered a wave of closures of shops and online outlets, although few prosecutions have followed due to difficulties proving in Irish law whether a substance is psychoactive.When the Home Office confirmed the delay in March, it said it was in the final stages of putting in place a programme of testing to demonstrate a substance’s psychoactivity before implementing the ban…’

Source: The Guardian

‘If Planet 9 exists, it’s been through one hell of an ordeal. That’s the takeaway from a series of new studies that ask how in the name of Uranus a planet could have gotten itself into such a whacked-out orbit. This in turn might help explain the unlikely orbits of half a dozen Kuiper Belt objects.

Planet 9 is a hypothetical world roughly the mass of Neptune that orbits our Sun in a giant ellipse, at a distance of 40 to over 100 billion miles. Although astronomers have proposed hidden ninth planets for years, this latest version—the brainchild of Caltech’s Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin—has gained quite a bit of traction since it was announced in January. The potential planet is so compelling that many astronomers have penned follow-up papers describing how we might find it and what it could look like…’

Source: Gizmodo

You will never see it listed on a death certificate as the cause of death, however.

‘Abstract: The annual list of the most common causes of death in the United States, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), informs public awareness and national research priorities each year. The list is created using death certificates filled out by physicians, funeral directors, medical examiners, and coroners. However, a major limitation of the death certificate is that it relies on assigning an International Classification of Disease (ICD) code to the cause of death.1 As a result, causes of death not associated with an ICD code, such as human and system factors, are not captured. The science of safety has matured to describe how communication breakdowns, diagnostic errors, poor judgment, and inadequate skill can directly result in patient harm and death. We analyzed the scientific literature on medical error to identify its contribution to US deaths in relation to causes listed by the CDC…’

Source: Martin Makary and Michael Daniel, BMJ

‘It’s a sentiment that many Americans are feeling today, but it also came from a brutal Facebook post by Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday following Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary and Ted Cruz’s decision to drop out.In the post, Warren called out Trump for his “racism, sexism, and xenophobia” and went on to call on Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to unite against Trump’s “toxic stew of hatred and insecurity” …’

Source: Vox

Are We Headed for Thousands of Times the Number of Overdose Deaths?

‘Global media outlets have recently been reporting the appearance of a terrifying new drug, known as W-18, on the streets of Canada, with many suggesting that the substance could be as much as 10,000 times stronger than morphine. However, the truth is that such comparisons are somewhat tenuous, since very little is actually known about how this alarming drug works – a fact that could potentially make it more dangerous than even these sensational reports imply.

Originally developed by scientists at the University of Alberta back in the mid-1980s, W-18 was intended to be a synthetic painkiller that could outperform existing opioid medications such as morphine and oxycodone. The substance was only ever tested on mice, and proved to be so strong that it sent some of the rodents into a five-day coma. However, research on W-18 was never taken any further, so instead of being used to develop new pharmaceuticals for human consumption, the compound went the way of so many other rejected research chemicals and simply disappeared into the abyss of forgotten science – until now.

The first sign of W-18 rearing its ugly head in the guise of a street drug came in August 2015, when police in Calgary busted a shipment of 110 pills thought to contain the prohibited substance fentanyl – itself a synthetic opioid purported to be around 10 times stronger than heroin. Chemical analysis revealed that a small number of these pills actually contained traces of W-18, thought to have been produced in Chinese laboratories. Since then, larger stashes of the substance have been found in other locations across Canada and the U.S., although because W-18 is so rare and unheard of, it has never actually been scheduled as an illegal compound…’

Source: IFLScience

‘There are ways to get in trouble with the law for just about everything: smoking weed, theft, horse theft, stealing a horse and teaching it to smoke weed, and even shouting “fire” in a crowded not-on-fire stable full of stoned horses. But numbers are pure and theoretical and definitely exempt from legal action, right?

Wrong, buddo. And the reason is that in the digital age, huge prime numbers are really, really important for encryption, as pointed out by YouTuber Wendoverproductions. So important, in fact, that having or sharing some of them could get you prosecuted under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits people from subverting copyright-prevention measures…’

Source: Gizmodo

…From a Scientist Whose Job That Is

‘Since its 60s counterculture heyday, LSD has been closely associated with music. But it’s not just artistic proclivities that link them: Researchers have found that listening to music can actually affect the LSD experience on a neurological level—and they have brain scans to back it. Mendel Kaelen, a PhD student in neuroscience at Imperial College, has led several studies investigating the combined influence of music and psychedelic drugs in human trials. One of the challenges? Choosing the music…’

Source: Motherboard

Why do we follow digital maps into dodgy places?

‘ “Death by GPS.” It describes what happens when your GPS fails you, not by being wrong, exactly, but often by being too right. It does such a good job of computing the most direct route from Point A to Point B that it takes you down roads which barely exist, or were used at one time and abandoned, or are not suitable for your car, or which require all kinds of local knowledge that would make you aware that making that turn is bad news…’

Source: Ars Technica

My wife and I experienced a lesser version of this just last weekend in the wilds of central Massachusetts. We were navigating scenic back roads by GPS, as is our wont, when we came over a rise to see our road peter out into a grassy meadow. A sign said: “Private Property. Your GPS Is Wrong.”

‘You might not have as many close friends as you think. Researchers have provided new evidence that lends weight to a theory that says you can only maintain five close friendships. You’ve probably heard of Dunbar’s Number which suggests that human beings can only maintain meaningful relationships with between 100 to 230 other people, and that number is typically 150. It’s been demonstrated to hold true in all kinds of situations—from ancient armies to big business. But you might not know that Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist behind the number, has since also suggested that those relationships are layered, like an onion. He argues that people typically have five ultra-close relationships, then 10 slightly less cozy companions, 35 at more distance, and then 100 in an outer circle. Now he and follow researchers have published data that appears to lend weight to the theory…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The ever-growing threat of aggrieved and vengeful passengers was what prompted a new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that investigated the impacts of cabin segregation on air rage. As it turns out, the hatred you might feel for first-class flyers is a common symptom of airline classism, and a primary cause for air rage…’

Source: Motherboard

‘Researchers have identified a single, universal facial expression that is interpreted across many cultures as the embodiment of negative emotion.The look proved identical for native speakers of English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL).It consists of a furrowed brow, pressed lips and raised chin, and because we make it when we convey negative sentiments, such as “I do not agree,” researchers are calling it the “not face.” …’

Source: Neuroscience Stuff

My most common facial expression…

Fr. Berrigan, along with his brother, has always been an inspirational intellectual and spiritual hero of mine, although I don’t have a Catholic bone in my body. I am deeply saddened by his passing but he is to be celebrated rather than mourned.

‘While the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has officially ended, isolated cases have appeared in Sierra Leone and Guinea earlier this year, prompting worries that the virus will likely have a constant presence in the region. A new study brings up some additional concerns: the virus might lie dormant in survivors longer than expected…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Scientists are currently on a decades-long search for intelligent alien life, but leading experts including Stephen Hawking have warned against this search in fear that if we succeed it could lead to the end of the human race as we know it.In the event that humankind discovers the existence of hostile aliens, researchers have found a viable way to hide Earth from near-certain doom…’

Source: Tech Insider

‘According to a new report published in “Nature” on April 20, 2016 by Patrick Egan and Megan Mullin, weather conditions have “improved” for the vast majority of Americans over the past 40 years. This, they argue, explains why there has been little public demand so far for a policy response to climate change.

Egan and Mullin do note that this trend is projected to reverse over the course of the coming century, and that Americans will become more concerned about climate change as they perceive more negative impact from weather. However, they estimate that such a shift may not occur in time to spur policy responses that could avert catastrophic impacts.

However, when we consider what Americans “prefer” with respect to weather, it is important to consider all variations in the weather – across hours, days and especially the extremes – rather than simply looking at annual averages…’

Source: IFLScience

‘In a major decision back in 2014, the Supreme Court finally ruled that police need a warrant to search someone’s cellphone when making an arrest.That case, Riley v. California, was a major privacy victory. Now, it’s being interpreted by a federal court in Illinois to mean that even opening a phone to look at the screen qualifies as a “search” and requires a warrant…’

Source: Motherboard

‘According to a paper posted to the arXiv pre-print server last week, the difference between an everyday supermassive black hole and a space-time tunneling wormhole may be a lacing of dark matter. While it sounds like crank fodder of the sort that not infrequently winds up on arXiv, the idea may hold actual water…’

Source: Motherboard

George RR Martin said, “If there’s one thing we know in A Song of Ice and Fire it’s that death is not necessarily permanent.” (The mystery of his parentage is not yet solved; he has a destiny to fulfill; and actor Kit Harington’s hair has been observed to still be long.)

Source: Vox

‘By the time I entered university in 1974, a revolution was well under way. As I understood it, “women’s liberation” meant that the frilly cookie-cutter template of femininity had been chucked out. Being female was no longer defined in terms of skirts, high heels, and homemaking. Men and women were equal. Both sexes were just people. We had entered the post-gender world.Fast-forward to 2016: I was wrong.We have entered instead an oppressively gendered world, in which identity is more bound up in one’s sex than ever before…’

Source: Prospect via 3Quarks

‘For every little red dot on the map, someone has reported hearing a low-frequency hum whose source they’ve been absolutely unable to identify.It’s not a new phenomenon, either. When Britain’s Sunday Mirror tabloid published an article about it called “Have You Heard the Hum?” in 1977, 800 people contacted the paper to say they had. There are accounts of what could be the hum dating as far back as 1828 when travelers to the Pyrenees heard a ”dull, low, moaning, aeolian sound” they couldn’t identify. And as recently as early April 2016, residents of Plymouth near the south shore of England were experiencing the return of an unexplained hum they’d first heard a year earlier…

The man behind the World Hum Map is Dr. Glen MacPherson, a former lecturer at the University of British Columbia. His map is a crowd-sourced effort to start figuring out, in some scientific way, what on earth—or above it?—causes the Hum. McPherson himself suspects the Hum may be a product of VLF (Very Low-Frequency) radio transmissions.

• Patrick Kempf

Now Fabrice Ardhuin, a senior researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France announced in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, that he’s figured out what produces the Hum: Pressure from waves on the seafloor are causing the Earth to oscillate and produce low-frequency sounds for 13 to 300 seconds. These microseismic waves can be picked up by seismic instruments and by the small number of people sensitive to these low frequencies…’

Source: Big Think

‘Sperm count, what is actually called sperm concentration, has dropped even among younger men. A man’s concentration must be 15 million sperm per milliliter or more. Below this point he is considered subfertile. Also, things like motility—its ability to swim vigorously in order to reach the egg, DNA formation, and even the size and shape of sperm are all incredibly important when it comes to conception. These qualities have declined as well. One French study, conducted between 1989 and 2005, and including 26,000 men, found that sperm counts dropped by one-third over the sixteen year period . Sperm quality also declined by a similar margin. The decrease was progressive—meaning it is probably still ongoing. Some studies point to sperm quality declining for at least the last century.

Gary Cherr is a reproductive toxicologist at the University of California, Davis. He says men in industrialized countries are producing poorer sperm than our primate cousins and other mammals. Among the most fertile men such an issue are still prominent, according to Cherr. In a recent European study, 20% of young men were found to be subfertile. This trend may be driving the recent popularity in fertility procedures, such as vitro fertilization (IVF). The rate of testicular cancer worldwide over the last 30 years has also doubled, and researchers wonder if there is a connection.

Though there still is no clear understanding of what is causing sperm’s decline, theories abound. Toxins in the environment such as endocrine disruptors (like PCBs), industrial waste, and agricultural chemicals—pesticides and fertilizers have all been blamed. One study found that industrially produced aluminum in the environment, first introduced as a consumer product around the same time the decline started, could be the culprit. Other suspects include exposure to radiation through electronic devices, a high fat diet, lack of exercise and a more sedentary lifestyle, and the obesity epidemic. Couples are also having children later in life, further affecting fertility…’

Source: Big Think

‘This column is part of a series where Verge staffers post highly subjective reviews of animals. Up until now, we’ve written about animals without telling you whether they suck or rule. We are now rectifying this oversight.

Okay, I’m probably about to piss off a bunch of scientists by using that name: coywolf. But it’s so catchy I’m going to keep using it — after all, the coolest breed of coyotes deserves a cool name. Coywolves, a hybrid animal that’s the result of mating between coyotes, wolves, and dogs, have been colonizing the eastern US pretty much undisturbed. (Maybe they should be dubbed coywolfdog or coydogwolf, but for obvious reasons none of these weird names have stuck around.)

Also called Canis latrans var., the coywolf is the newest top predator of the east coast, ranging from Florida to Maine and up into Canada. Seriously, if you live in Boston or Washington, DC, expect to run into them at the park or in a cemetery at some point in your life. In New York City, they’ve been spotted in downtown Manhattan, as well as on the roof of a bar in Long Island City. (Just because the raccoon invasion wasn’t enough.)

Coywolves do look slightly different from regular western coyotes. They have longer legs and a longer body, smaller ears, a bushier tail, a larger jaw, and a wider skull. They weigh between 35 and 45 pounds, and they usually live in families of three to five if food is abundant. Their genetic makeup is roughly 65 percent coyote, 25 percent wolf, and 10 percent dog, making them a little wilder than a poodle but less scary than an actual wolf. (Coywolves will take down a deer just like a wolf though; they don’t limit their diet to rabbits and small rodents.)

We helped create them, of course. In the 1800s and early 1900s, we decimated wolves because they killed livestock. We also cut down huge amounts of trees in the northeastern US for lumber and to make space for pastures and crops. As you can imagine, all of this limited wolves’ mating options. Desperate for sex, wolves began mating with eastward-expanding coyotes. The first coywolf was detected around 1919 in Ontario, Canada; half a century later dog DNA was mixed in, giving rise to the new animal hybrid that’s so common today. There’s no real estimate of how many coywolves lurk in Americans’ backyards at night, but their number is in the millions, says Roland Kays of North Carolina State University.

Coywolves are basically living reminders that evolution happens all the time and animals adapt to deal with the biggest destroyer of all, humans. “They’re an example of nature adapting very rapidly to the changes that we have made in the planet,” Kays tells The Verge. “It shows how evolution can help animals live in the modern world.” I mean, how cool is that? We finally found an animal that’s not about to be wiped out because of how badly we screwed up…’

Source: The Verge

Source: Reddit MapPorn

‘Quantum spin liquid is a phase where electrons actually fracture apart—and begin to behave very strangely. As Gizmodo previously reported:“We usually consider electrons to be fundamental particles, that is, indivisible into smaller components. But things get weird when you get down to two dimensions. In this space, quantum mechanics allows an electron to split into two (or three) smaller components, each carrying a fraction of the charge. They’re like bubbles that form in a quantum liquid.” …’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The alien world of the deep sea has some very odd inhabitants.Photographer Wayne MacWilliams dove 150 meters (500 feet) into the waters off the coast of Singer Island in Palm Beach, Florida, to capture a particularly fascinating moment from the deep sea’s black abyss.The images show a translucent sea creature, possibly a species of comb jelly, with a shimmering fish in its belly that it had eaten just moments before….’

Source: IFLScience

‘An anonymous source has handed 2.6TB worth of records from Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s largest offshore law firms, to a consortium of news outlets, including The Guardian.The dump includes 11.5M files, whose contents reveal a complex system of tax evasion that implicates some of the richest, most powerful people in the world, from Vladimir Putin to former members of the UK Tory government and the father of UK Tory prime minister David Cameron.’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reid’s workbook, “to obtain an admission of guilt.” Most of the I.P.A. session, Schneider told me, focussed on behavioral analysis. Buckley described to trainees how patterns of body language—including slumping, failing to look directly at the interviewer, offering “evasive” responses, and showing generally “guarded” behaviors—could supposedly reveal whether a suspect was lying. (Some of the cues were downright mythological—like, for instance, the idea that individuals look left when recalling the truth and right when trying to fabricate.) Several times during the session, Buckley showed videos of interrogations involving serious crimes, such as murder, theft, and rape. None of the videos portrayed young people being questioned for typical school misbehavior, nor did any of the Reid teaching materials refer to “students” or “kids.” They were always “suspects” or “subjects.” …’

Source: The New Yorker

One of America’s great paradoxes (or perhaps hypocrisies) is its claim to be a global beacon of freedom, even as it jails more of its citizens—by population percentage and in raw numbers—than any other country in the world. This tendency toward suspicion, hyper-enforcement and punishment is so pervasive it even trickles down to our kids.

CNN cites a National Center for Education Statistics report that finds 43 percent of U.S. public schools have some form of security personnel patrolling their halls and grounds, a figure that rises to 63 and 64 percent, respectively, in public middle and high schools.

In addition to the school resource officer, the over-policing of American society has now given rise to a new figure: the educator-interrogator. As the Guardian noted last year and the New Yorker discussed recently, school administrators are increasingly being trained as interrogators to extract confessions from students for so-called “crimes”—most often, minor offenses from schoolyard scuffles to insubordination. Instruction in the interrogation arts is provided by John E. Reid and Associates, a global interrogation training firm that contracts with police departments, armed services divisions and security companies around the country. According to the New Yorker, the company has taught its patented “Reid Technique” to hundreds of school administrators in eight states. That training may be leading to an increasing number of students ‘fessing up, even when they have nothing to confess to.

As the New Yorker notes, “like the adult version of the Reid Technique, the school version involves three basic parts: an investigative component, in which you gather evidence; a behavioral analysis, in which you interview a suspect to determine whether he or she is lying; and a nine-step interrogation, a nonviolent but psychologically rigorous process that is designed, according to Reid’s workbook, ‘to obtain an admission of guilt.’”

Source: Alternet

‘Imagine that pesky tabby cat has been pooing in your backyard again. Unbeknown to you, it has transferred some of the parasite spores it was carrying onto your herb garden. Unintentionally, while preparing a tasty salad, you forget to wash your hands and infect yourself with the Toxoplasma gondii spores. For months you display no symptoms, then after six months you are driving your car more aggressively, taking chances in road junctions and generally filled with more road rage as you angrily gesticulate with fellow drivers. Could all this be linked to that tasty salad?…’

Source: IFLScience

Via Atlas Obscura: ‘Darnel is poisonous, but in small enough doses can give food a special kick’

‘Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) is known as “broken heart syndrome” and is characterised by a sudden temporary weakening of the heart muscles that causes the left ventricle of the heart to balloon out at the bottom while the neck remains narrow, creating a shape resembling a Japanese octopus trap, from which it gets its name. Since this relatively rare condition was first described in 1990, evidence has suggested that it is typically triggered by episodes of severe emotional distress, such as grief, anger or fear, with patients developing chest pains and breathlessness. It can lead to heart attacks and death.

Now, for the first time, researchers have systematically analysed data from the largest group of patients diagnosed with TTS worldwide, and found that some patients have developed the condition after a happy or joyful event; they have named it “happy heart syndrome”. …’

Source: Neuroscience Stuff

‘Stephanie Cegielski was in the Trump campaign from the beginning, first serving as communications director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC, then shutting down the PAC “in order to position him as the quintessential non-politician.”

Cegielski served as Trump’s communications director through the campaign, which, she says, no one intended to be a serious run at the White House — not even Trump. Rather, the goal was to take Trump to double-digit poll numbers and shake up the establishment, because Trump didn’t want to be president, he “just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House.”

As Trump’s campaign success exceeded beyond everyone’s wildest speculation, Cegielski watched in horror as Trump talked himself into believing that he had what it took to run the nation. Even as this was happening, Cegielski was coming to appreciate that the campaign’s internal slogan, “Let Trump Be Trump,” was hiding the real truth: “Let Trump Help Trump.”

She discovered (later than she had any excuse to, really), that Trump was a self-serving monster who’d throw his own mother under the bus to secure even the smallest advantage for himself. Trump is a walking Dunning-Kruger effect, whose lack of self-awareness about his own limitations results in gaffe after gaffe. Combine this fatal, unknowing ignorance with his lack of compunction about harming others to help himself and you get a campaign where Trump’s most loyal followers are, one after another, sacrificed by Trump himself, who scapegoats them to make up for his shortcomings.

Cegielski’s realization that this would be the motif of a Trump presidency, with America itself standing in for the hapless interns that Trump has victimized on his race to the top, led her to “defect” and to warn Trump’s supporters that they’re creating a monster.

I fear that Cegielski’s revelations about Trump’s self-absorption and indifference to the welfare of others has been obvious to everyone who wasn’t a Trump supporter since day one, and that her note will do no good in convincing the faithful who’ve ignored so many other warnings to date.’

Source: Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

It’s “the worst bleaching ever seen on what was the healthiest part of the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr. Mark Eakin, the Coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, told me. “It’s quite sad.”Australia, he says, “may lose half of their healthiest corals.” He adds: “This won’t be the end of the GBR but it is a huge amount of damage. The problem is that it can take decades for reefs to recover from bleaching this bad and severe bleaching is becoming much more frequent and more severe.”

Source: Motherboard

‘Sometimes not all is as it seems. On the the streets of New York City, that can mean some of the iconic yellow cabs are in fact disguised NYPD cop cars—but how can you spot them?

Motherboard yesterday published an article, based on FOIA requests, which saw the NYPD admit that it has at least three undercover cop cars that are made to look like taxis. But, as Boing Boing reports and Gawker has told us in the past, some people have known about the phenomenon for much, much longer.

One of those people is Herman Yung, who’s a keen taxi-spotter. Yesterday, in response to the Motherboard article, he published his own gallery showing seven cabs that he’s spotted in recent years which he believes to be cop cars. Incidentally, their registered cab numbers are—or at least, were—2W97, 6Y19, 6Y17, 2W95, 2W68, 6Y13, and 6Y21, if you’re watching out.But perhaps more interesting is Yung’s guide to spotting these undercover cop cars. Here are his top tips…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The above video comes from photographer Eric Cheng who explained:

“The source video is a CNN highlights reel from Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy announcement in July 2015. I used audio volume (averaged over each frame) to dictate how deep to dream. For fun, I used a picture of Cthulu as a guide image.”

Cthulu meets Trump as understood by an A.I. that can dream. Welcome to the state of American politics in 2016.’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Most NYC subway riders are pretty blasé when panhandlers hit them up for cash between stations. When a panhandler announced he was collecting funds to build a time machine, riders chuckled at the odd request—until another man boarded the train and announced he was the inventor’s future self. He implored them not to give any money because time travel will ruin everything.It sounds just like that X-Files episode (“Synchrony”) where a scientist travels from the future to stop his younger self from making the cryobiological compound that will one day enable time travel. But it’s actually an elaborate prank by Improv Everywhere…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The term “bird brain” is going out of fashion as biologists come to understand that birds are actually quite smart and competent. Now scientists in Barbados say that, in many respects, urban birds are smarter than rural birds…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘…[s]cientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland have found that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a novel we might think of as perhaps the most self-consciously referential examination of language written in any tongue—is “almost indistinguishable in its structure from a purely mathematical multifractal.” Trying to explain this finding in as plain English as possible, Julia Johanne Tolo at Electric Literature writes:To determine whether the books had fractal structures, the academics looked at the variation of sentence lengths, finding that each sentence, or fragment, had a structure that resembled the whole of the book.

And it isn’t only Joyce. Through a statistical analysis of 113 works of literature, the researchers found that many texts written by the likes of Dickens, Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco, and Samuel Beckett had multifractal structures. The most mathematically complex works were stream-of-consciousness narratives, hence the ultimate complexity of Finnegans Wake, which Professor Stanisław Drożdż, co-author of the paper published at Information Sciences, describes as “the absolute record in terms of multifractality.” …

A close second to Joyce’s classic work, surprisingly, is Dave Egger’s post-modern memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and much, much further down the scale, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Proust’s masterwork, writes Phys.org, shows “little correlation to multifractality” as do certain other books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The measure may tell us little about literary quality, though Professor Drożdż suggests that “it may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another.” …

Of the finding that stream-of-consciousness works seem to be the most fractal, McBride says, “By its nature, such writing is concerned not only with the usual load-bearing aspects of language—content, meaning, aesthetics, etc—but engages with language as the object in itself, using the re-forming of its rules to give the reader a more prismatic understanding…. Given the long-established connection between beauty and symmetry, finding works of literature fractally quantifiable seems perfectly reasonable.” Maybe so, or perhaps the Polish scientists have fallen victim to a more sophisticated variety of the psychological sharpshooter’s fallacy that affects “Bible Code” enthusiasts? I imagine we’ll see some fractal skeptics emerge soon enough. But the idea that the worlds-within-worlds feeling one gets when reading certain books—the sense that they contain universes in miniature—may be mathematically verifiable sends a little chill up my spine.’

Source: Open Culture

‘A map of the known universe to a constant scale would either be very big, or very useless. But use a logarithmic scale to compress the distances as you travel outwards, and you get this gorgeous and slightly Eye-of-Sauron image.The map was created by artist Pablo Carlos Budassi, using a series of images and data gathered by NASA and ESA missions. Starting in the middle, you move through the Solar System, past the Kuiper belt, into the Milky Way, all the way out into cosmic microwave radiation and the Big Bang’s plasma on the edge.The image has been released into the public domain, which means you’re perfectly welcome to stick it onto a black background, set as your phone background, and spend your commutes staring endlessly into the vortex of space…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘In advance of her HBO special Heart of a Dog premiering on April 24, the amazing Laurie Anderson appeared on Late Night With Stephen Colbert and performed a beautifully discordant song for a small group of dogs. A bit earlier in the show, Anderson spoke about the project and how she came up with the idea with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma while they were both waiting backstage at a graduation….’

Source: Laughing Squid

‘From The Atlantic’s archives, a harrowing 1961 account of a Soviet surgeon on a primitive Antarctic base who had to remove his own appendix, stopping frequently as he battled vertigo and blood loss…’

Source: Boing Boing

Via Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory:

‘Greenland’s snowy surfaces have been getting darker over the past two decades, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt, a new study of satellite data shows. That trend is likely to continue, with the surface’s reflectivity, or albedo, decreasing by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century, the study says.

While soot blowing in from wildfires contributes to the problem, it hasn’t been driving the change, the study finds. The real culprits are two feedback loops created by the melting itself. One of those processes isn’t visible to the human eye, but it is having a profound effect.’ (Thanks, Seth).

So essentially, melting begets more melting, as if we shouldn’t have known that already.

“If you wake up tomorrow morning and believe that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis, you’re a lunatic. But if you believe the same thing about a cracker turning into the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.”

‘What’s newsworthy isn’t just that AlphaGo has won its first two matches, but what this means for the acceleration of the pace at which computers are getting smarter…’

Source: Medium

Via NYTimes.com:

‘Islamic State leaders have made sexual slavery as they believe it was practiced during the Prophet Muhammad’s time integral to the group’s operations, preying on the women and girls the group captured from the Yazidi religious minority almost two years ago. To keep the sex trade running, the fighters have aggressively pushed birth control on their victims so they can continue the abuse unabated while the women are passed among them.’

Today I learned: that this nasty sociopathic, lying, bombastic, sausage-fingered demagogic man’s real family name was the considerably less impressive ‘brand’ “Drumpf.”

‘Appearing this morning on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union, Donald Trump was asked to disavow support from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and other white supremacists and politely declined.Trump, being a cautious sort and not one to just talk without gathering all the facts and giving a matter serious consideration, said he would have to do more research because at the moment he lacked sufficient information to disavow them…’

Source: Vox

‘…[T]he difference between Sanders and Clinton can be seen in which black leaders support each candidate. Because [Sanders is] an upstart in terms of national-level politics, he’s much more willing to bring in innovative thinkers. You can see by some of the people who have backed him that some of these are people who are leading the way when it comes to black political thought in the modern era. In thinking about mass incarceration, black wealth accumulation, political voice, things of that nature. Whereas Hillary Clinton has found a niche with more of the traditional leadership infrastructure…’

Source: Vox

‘…[M]ost establishment Republicans fear Trump more than they hate him. They’re not willing to risk coming out against him now; they assume the damage they would do to his campaign is less than the damage he can do to them if he wins…’

Source: Vox

‘Twitter has been crucial to the terrorist group ISIS convincing Westerners to join its “caliphate” in the Middle East and mount attacks at home.But it looks like ISIS — aka the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh — is now losing steam on the social-media platform. A new report from the George Washington University Program on Extremism shows that efforts to suspend terrorist-affiliated Twitter accounts have been successful in slowing the group’s reach on the platform…’

Source: Business Insider

‘…just as today’s cat lovers flood the internet with anthromorphized felines, Victorian-era Englanders also found representations of the pets to obsess over—namely, the cats drawn by prolific illustrator Louis Wain, whose cartoonish animals populated the era’s magazines, children’s books, and postcards. During Wain’s life, though, his fortunes reversed several times. Believed to be suffering from schizophrenia, Wain lived his final years in institutions. Eight of his cat drawings—which range from cuddly to psychedelic—came to be known as the “Famous Series” and for years would be offered up as a the stages of a deteriorating mind, illustrated. But the truth is a bit more complicated….’

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘Some animals are capable of magnetoreception—an added sense that helps them detect magnetic fields. European scientists have now learned that the molecule responsible for this trait is also found in the eyes of dogs and some primates, which suggests they too might be capable of seeing magnetic fields.

Cryptochromes are a common group of light-sensitive molecules that exist in bacteria, plants, and animals. In addition to regulating circadian rhythms, these specialized proteins enable certain animals, such as birds, insects, fish, and reptiles, to sense magnetic fields, allowing them to perceive direction, altitude, and location. Humans are incapable of magnetoreception. Some mammals, like bats, mole rats, and mice, appear to have this sense, but the extent of this capacity among other mammals is largely unknown.

Now, in the first study of its kind, researchers from the Max Planck Institute and several other institutions have investigated the presence of the mammalian version of this molecule, called cryptochrome 1, in the retinas of 90 animal species. Researchers found this molecule in the blue-sensitive cones of dog-like carnivores, such as dogs, wolves, bears, foxes, and badgers, but not in the eyes of cat-like carnivores, such as cats, lions, and tigers (felines have their own unique way of looking at the world). Among primates, researchers discovered the presence of cryptochrome 1 in orangutans, the rhesus macaque, the crab-eating macaque, and others. The details can now be found in Nature Scientific Reports.

Though it’s considered a “sixth sense,” magnetoreception is tied to an animal’s visual system. Magnetic fields activate cryptochrome 1 in the retina, which the animal “sees” as the inclination of magnetic field lines relative to the Earth’s surface. Because the active cryptochrome 1 is located in the light-sensitive outer segments of the cone cells of the mammals, the researchers suspect that it’s assisting with magnetoreception, and not circadian rhythm management or some other visual capacity.

It’s not immediately obvious how mammals like dogs and primates use their magnetoreception, but foxes may provide a clue: When hunting, foxes are more successful at catching mice when they pounce on them in a northeast direction. For primates, this built-in compass may help with bodily orientation, or it could be a vestigial evolutionary trait that’s largely unused…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘When not delighting in the epic meltdown of establishment Republican Party politics, many people I know — my wife, my boss, etc. — are expressing terror at the notion that Donald Trump might actually become president of the United States. I’m more sanguine. Not out of any particular love for Trump, but because he’s actually running on a much less extreme agenda than his “establishment” rival Marco Rubio, who’s offering a platform of economic ruin, multiple wars, and an attack on civil liberties that’s nearly as vicious as anything Trump has proposed — even while wrapping it in an edgy, anxious, overreaction-prone approach to politics that heavily features big risky bets and huge, unpredictable changes in direction…’

Source: Vox

‘The evidence against tipping is voluminous and damning: it plunges workers into sub-subsistence wages, subjects woman servers to sexual harassment, encourages servers to deliver poor service to people of color (and old, young, and foreign people), incentivizes workers to take actions that harm the business (free drinks for big tippers!), and covers up a system of widespread criminal wage-fraud that lands disproportionately on the backs of workers who are already poor and marginalized…’

Source: Boing Boing

From the National Geographic twitter feed:

‘Monlam, the great prayer festival is being celebrated this weekend throughout the Tibetan world. Here in Labrang Monastery, novice monks (trapa), practice blowing the dungchen, the Tibetan long horn, that will be used in ceremonies and the call to prayer. The sound can be compared to the singing of elephants.’

‘It was a sad day for poetry when Ezra Pound discovered Confucius. Like some latter-day Don Quixote addled by tales of chivalry, Pound became enthralled by Confucian precepts, and though they never had any appreciable influence on his own thoughts or actions—he was the least Confucian of men—those precepts, or his version of them, scrambled his brains for the next sixty years…’

Source: 3quarksdaily

Via Tech Insider: A major event affecting the world’s supply of bananas could leave us without the world’s most popular fruit.

‘The FBI wants Apple’s help to investigate a terrorist attack. Apple says providing this help is the real danger. We’ve reached a boiling point in the battle between tech companies and the government over encryption. And what happens will affect anyone who uses a smartphone, including you…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The experimental setup cost roughly $3000, researchers say.’

Source: Motherboard

‘A groundbreaking new therapy in which white blood cells were reprogrammed to attack cancer cells is showing great promise after more than 90 percent of terminally ill leukemia patients had their symptoms disappear completely.

For the new therapy, white blood cells were extracted from terminally ill cancer patients, and then genetically reprogrammed to better recognize and target cancer cells. Once reintroduced into a patient’s bloodstream, the juiced-up immune cells made it much more difficult for the cancer to spread and take hold. Oncologist Stanley Riddell from Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center shared his team’s findings on Monday at the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Washington DC.

In one trial, 94 percent of terminally ill lymphoblastic leukemia patients went into remission. Patients with similar blood cancers experienced response rates greater than 80 percent, with more than half going into remission.

The details have yet to be published in a peer reviewed science journal, so we need to be cautious about these findings. Indeed, the researchers themselves said that the results are very preliminary and that more work needs to be done. It’s not known, for example, how long the patients will remain in remission; the scientists aren’t calling it a cure, even though symptoms disappeared in many cases. What’s more, two patients actually died from the therapy after it triggered an extreme immune response. All participants involved in the study were terminally ill cancer patients with about two to five months to live, and none were responding to conventional treatments. But Riddell described the early data as “unprecedented,” saying it’s a “potential paradigm shift” in cancer treatment…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The United States’ commitment to combatting climate change will affect the entire world. Last week, the Supreme Court froze Obama’s plan to uphold that commitment, sparking fears that the Paris climate agreement would fall apart. But the death of justice Antonin Scalia over the weekend changes everything.Scalia might have been surprisingly progressive on technology, but when it came to climate change, the justice was a staunch defender of the proud American tradition of doing nothing.’

Source: Gizmodo

A few great articles today:

Man missing for 30 years realizes that he’s someone else: ‘This is Edgar Latulip of southwestern Ontario. The developmentally disabled man has been missing since 1986 but was just found about 120 kilometers from his hometown. Or rather, he found himself. Latulip had lost his memory due to a head injury after he disappeared and had created a new identity. Last month, he realized he wasn’t who he thought he was. On Jan. 7, Latulip met with a social worker and told her he thought he was somebody else, Gavin said. The social worker found his missing persons case file and police were then called in. Latulip volunteered to have a DNA test done and on Monday, the results came back indicating he was Latulip.’

Sparrow joins Japanese family: ‘A sparrow followed an elderly Japanese woman home from her job as a crossing guard in November, and now lives with her and her husband. “He’s like a family member – he’s very comforting. It’s fun, coming home to a sparrow,” Yoshiko Fujino told Reuters.’

‘Henry Rosario Martinez died at the age of 31. He loved poker, so his friends played one last game with him by propping up his corpse and giving him a large pile of chips. Despite Martinez’s remarkable poker face, he didn’t win.’

A New York State Supreme Court judge has confirmed that Staten Island Borough President James Oddo can name three streets in a new property development with words that imply greediness and deceitfulness on the part of the developers.

Puppy shoots Florida man: ‘A man who decided to shoot a bunch of puppies was himself shot by one of his intended victims. NBC News reports that Jerry Allen Bradford, 37, of Pensacola, Florida, sustained a gunshot to the wrist when “one of the dogs put its paw on the revolver’s trigger.” ‘

And this one is serious. Black travel guide for a racist America: ‘In 1936, postal worker Victor H. Green worked with his colleagues in the Postal Workers Union to create a guide for black travelers navigating a country where many restaurants, hotels, and shops were still “whites only,” and the real threat of physical assault and arrest hung in their faces. “You needed The Green Book to tell you where you can go without having doors slammed in your face,” civil rights leader Julian Bond once said. The Green Book was updated and in print until 1966. “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” reads the introduction.’

One is supposedly not to speak ill of the dead, but I (and, I imagine, many classes of disadvantaged and disenfranchised in this country) would be dishonest if I didn’t mark the death of Antonin Scalia with some satisfaction. And I take a particular pleasure in the fact that this longest serving judge on the court and its most influential and outspoken conservative (if not reactionary) took his final bow on Pres. Obama’s watch. With any luck, we can gain some relief from a quarter-century of the execrable and intellectually damaged originalist school of thought he championed, which led to outcomes so pleasing to conservatives. Here’s a trip through prior FmH pieces on Scalia’s uniformly unflattering legacy.

(And what in the world is the shiftless Clarence Thomas going to do without his guidance?)

Vox has by far the consistently best roundup and explanation of the issues engendered by his death. Here is a sampling:

The fight over Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee will be the most politicized and high-stakes nomination fight in decades. Replacing Antonin Scalia will be a profound test of the American political system. With Scalia’s death, the Presidential race is a referendum on the Supreme Court.

Antonin Scalia’s death could lead to more 4-4 ties. Here’s what happens if it does.

The death of Justice Antonin Scalia has forced partisans to become experts on Supreme Court history. But, despite the so-called Thurmond Rule, at least 14 Supreme Court justices have been confirmed during election years.. In fact, Scalia himself was appointed by Pres. Reagan in his last year in office. Mitch McConnell: “this vacancy should not be filled” until 2017. The Senate’s top Democrat: that’s “shameful.” Hillary Clinton: Republican calls to leave Justice Scalia’s seat vacant “dishonor our constitution”

Scalia’s sudden death — and the chaos it’s about to cause — makes a strong case against lifetime appointments to the Court. Time for term limits for Supreme Court justices.

Who will Obama choose to replace Antonin Scalia? Here are 7 of the strongest candidates. Place your bets now. I went to college with Merrick Garland but I think the likelihood of the sole white male on the list getting the President’s nod is pretty low, although he is one of the candidates more palatable to the likely rabid Senate opposition.