We now have the potential to banish the genes that kill us, that make us susceptible to cancer, heart disease, depression, addictions and obesity, and to select those that may make us healthier, stronger, more intelligent. (…)

During that year, fertility clinics across the country have begun to take advantage of the technology’s latest tools. They are sending cells from embryos conceived here through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to private U.S. labs equipped to test them rapidly for an ever-growing list of genetic disorders that couples hope to avoid.

Recent breakthroughs have made it possible to scan every chromosome in a single embryonic cell, to test for genes involved in hundreds of “conditions,” some of which are clearly life-threatening while others are less dramatic and less certain – unlikely to strike until adulthood if they strike at all.

And science is far from finished. On the horizon are DNA microchips able to analyze more than a thousand traits at once, those linked not just to a child’s health but to enhancements – genes that influence height, intelligence, hair, skin and eye color and athletic ability.

{ The Globe and Mail | Continue reading }

photo { Loretta Lux }

In a new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), people with schizophrenia showed greater brain activity during tests that induce a brief, mild form of delusional thinking. This effect wasn’t seen in a comparison group without schizophrenia.

“We studied a type of delusion called a delusion of reference, which occurs when people feel that external stimuli such as newspaper articles or strangers’ overheard conversations are about them,” says CAMH Scientist Dr. Mahesh Menon, adding that this type of delusion occurs in up to two-thirds of people with schizophrenia. “Then they come up with an explanation for this feeling to make sense of it or give it meaning.”

The study was an initial exploration of the theory that the overactive firing of dopamine neurons in specific brain regions is involved in converting neutral, external information into personally relevant information among people with schizophrenia. This may lead to symptoms of delusions. “We wanted to see if we could find a way to ’see’ these delusions during Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanning,” says Dr. Menon.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and by poor emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests itself as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social or occupational dysfunction. The onset of symptoms typically occurs in young adulthood, with a global lifetime prevalence of about 0.3–0.7%.

Genetics, early environment, neurobiology, and psychological and social processes appear to be important contributory factors; some recreational and prescription drugs appear to cause or worsen symptoms. Current research is focused on the role of neurobiology, although no single isolated organic cause has been found. The many possible combinations of symptoms have triggered debate about whether the diagnosis represents a single disorder or a number of discrete syndromes.

Despite the etymology of the term from the Greek roots skhizein (”to split”) and phren- (”mind”), schizophrenia does not imply a “split mind” and it is not the same as dissociative identity disorder—also known as “multiple personality disorder” or “split personality”—a condition with which it is often confused in public perception.

The mainstay of treatment is antipsychotic medication, which primarily suppresses dopamine (and sometimes serotonin) receptor activity.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Brian James }

A fortuitous combination of ravenous bacteria, ocean currents and local topography helped to rapidly purge the Gulf of Mexico of much of the oil and gas released in the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010, researchers reported on Monday.

After spewing oil and gas for nearly three months, the BP PLC well was finally capped in mid-July 2010. Some 200,000 tons of methane gas and about 4.4 million barrels of petroleum spilled into the ocean. Given the enormity of the spill, many scientists predicted that a significant amount of the resulting chemical pollutants would likely persist in the region’s waterways for years.

According to a new federally funded study published Monday by the National Academy of Sciences, those scientists were wrong. By the end of September 2010, the vast underwater plume of methane, plus other gases, had all but disappeared. By the end of October, a significant amount of the underwater offshore oil—a complex substance made from thousands of compounds—had vanished as well.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

{ Chris Cunningham, Rubber Johnny, 2005 }

photo { Thomas Lélu }

Carissa Kowalski Dougherty explores how album covers moved from the purely functional to graphic works of art that conveyed the tone, mood, and feel of the lyric-less jazz music contained within. Dougherty also investigates how race is designated on the covers, an item, she says, that is inextricably linked to the music itself.

During the postwar period, African-American artists and musicians were confronting the same issues in their respective fields: how to retain their identity as black Americans while being recognized as skilled artists regardless of race; how to convey their own personal experiences; how to overcome discrimination; how to succeed in their field, and how to express pride in their African heritage—all without the aid of words.

{ MIT/Design Issue | Link to PDF }

Professor Trifonov analyzes the vocabulary of 123 existing definitions of life in order to provide a possible path for finding a possible minimal agreement among scientists. To this purpose, he compares from a linguistic point of view the definitions and ranks the terms used therein according to their frequency. (…)

The outcome of this analysis is a definition of life as “self-reproduction with variations.” (…)

Is “self-reproduction with changes” a good definition? Can this definition actually provide a minimal basis of consensus?

{ Fabrizio Macagno/SSRN | Continue reading }

Names of countries in foreign languages (exonyms) often bear no relationship to the names of the same countries in their own official language or languages (endonyms). Such differences are generally accepted without complaint; the fact that English speakers refer to Deutschland as Germany and Nihon as Japan is not a problem for the governments or the people of those countries.

Occasionally, however, diplomats from a given country request that other governments change its name. (…)

Over the past several years, Georgia has been trying to convince a number of countries to call it “Georgia,” even though the Georgian name for the country is Sakart’velo.

{ GeoCurrents | Continue reading }

Laurie Anderson: And I thought, I must meet this guy [Andy Kaufman], and I went up to him and said, “I love what you’re doing,” and I became his sidekick. I followed him around for a couple of years and did his straight-man stuff in his clubs. You know, he wrote an incredible book that was never published.

The Believer: Really?

Laurie Anderson: Yeah—it should have been published. He came over here and read it to me on a lot of nights. I don’t know what happened to this book. But in terms of expectation, he was the beyond-master of anyone that I’ve ever come across. He was a genius of disrupted expectation. For example, we’d go out to Coney Island to just practice situations, and we’d get on the roto-whirl where the bottom drops out, and we’d just be spinning around, so there’s a minute where everyone’s locked in. And that’s when he began to freak out: “I think we’re all going to die on this ride! Look at the way the belts are done, they’re really flimsy!” And everyone is like, “Who is this moron?” and second, “Maybe the belts aren’t attached that well,” and it was chaos. Or we’d go over to the test-your-strength thing, and my job was to help him make fun of the guys who were doing it. [Doing Andy’s voice] “Ah, look at this weakling”—and everyone got so angry at that for a while. They’d go, “OK, you try it, wise guy,” and so he would—and I’m supposed to, like, nag him. [Doing a whiney voice] “Get me a bunny, Annndy. I want a big bunny. Look at these guys, you’re a lot stronger than they are!” And, anyway, so he would try, and it would hardly register on the scale at all, it wouldn’t even get up to “Try Again, Weakling,” it just went beep [flatline noise], and at that point he would demand to see the manager: “I don’t know why this happened!” And everyone is like, “Oh god,” and he goes way beyond what’s supposed to happen.

{ Interview with Laurie Anderson | Continue reading }

Coca-Cola was named back in 1885 for its two “medicinal” ingredients: extract of coca leaves and kola nuts. Just how much cocaine was originally in the formulation is hard to determine, but the drink undeniably contained some cocaine in its early days. (…)

Back in 1885 it was far from uncommon to use cocaine in patent medicines (which is what Coca-Cola was originally marketed as) and other medical potions. When it first became general knowledge that cocaine could be harmful, the backroom chemists who comprised Coca-Cola at the time (long before it became the huge company we now know) did everything they could with the technology they had available at the time to remove every trace of cocaine from the beverage.

{ Snopes | Continue reading }

artwork { Robert Rauschenberg, Coca Cola Plan, 1958 }

Penis tattoo gives guy permanent erection.

Louis Vuitton sues Hangover 2 for using fake luggage.

Watching Paint Dry Championship attracts international interest.

A Swedish woman who lost her wedding ring 16 years ago was flabbergasted when she found it again, around a carrot growing in her garden.

The number of twins born in the United States has doubled in the last three decades largely as a result of fertility treatments.

Pigeons on par with monkeys in maths ability.

A new report from McKinsey Global Institute attempts to quantify how much the internet is worth.

Worldwide there are approximately 200 million users of (illegal) drugs. That is one in twenty people between 15 and 64, according to a study published in The Lancet.

We provide direct evidence of market manipulation at the beginning of the financial crisis in November 2007.

Should we erase painful memories? “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” could soon become a reality — but the concept raises some thorny questions.

Letting go of memories supports a sound state of mind, a sharp intellect–and superior recall.

This was the first study to put volunteers under anaesthesia solely as part of an experiment. It turns out the conscious mind keeps working way past the point where people are medically defined as unconscious.

Scientists have several explanations for why modern humans are the only hominids that have chins.

How crossword puzzles mess with your mind.

The Earth’s rotation is notoriously unpredictable. So how can a clock keep time for 10,000 years?

Earth Must Have Another Moon, Say Astronomers.

Does The Weather Affect Your Mood? Do grey skies make you blue or is it summer that gets your goat?

Physiognomy “is the assessment of a person’s character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face.” Although one might think of physiognomy as an outdated pseudoscience, along with its brethren craniometry and phrenology, facial phenotyping has undergone a resurgence of interest.

How to break Murphy’s Law.

It’s never too early to start thinking about dessert.

Atlantic salmon just can’t catch a break. Like their Pacific counterparts, Atlantic salmon are anadromous, meaning they live in the ocean as adults, but swim upriver to spawn. Who’s Eating Atlantic Salmon?

On the second line the words ‘‘DONATING = LOVING’’ (loving condition), ‘‘DONATING = HELPING’’ (helping condition), or no inscription (control) appeared. The second line was changed each day and for each bakery according to a random distribution. Results showed that more donations were made in the loving condition compared to the two others, whereas there was no difference between the helping and the control conditions. [PDF]

Are there differences in mortality among wine consumers and other alcoholic beverages?

Novice wine drinkers are more easily swayed to purchase wine based on its advertising.

As Banks Start Nosing Around Facebook and Twitter, the Wrong Friends Might Just Sink Your Credit.

Effin finally allowed on Facebook.

As Mark Zuckerberg, Apple designer Jony Ive, author Danielle Steel, and other guests mingled, acts including Snoop Dogg, Jane’s Addiction, and the Killers—flown in on private jets—performed for the well-lubricated crowd. It’s always sunny in Silicon Valley.

Apple & Google Bid For UK Football TV Rights?

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It. Here’s Why.

Everything I need to know about startups, I learned from a crime boss.

Why is the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation investing in GM giant Monsanto? [2010]

The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin.

The House bill is called the Stop Online Piracy Act. Hollywood’s pirate cure is worse than the disease.

This article addresses the ongoing, increasing privatization of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing systems – the emergence of systems that users may only join by personal, friend-to-friend invitation.

It appears that the Internet is soon going to fulfill its potential to become a giant on-demand repository of television shows (and movies) available asynchronously. As companies such as Netflix and Hulu increase their activities in this sphere, there are many unanswered questions about the impacts of this transition. In this paper we attempt to foretell the impact of this shift on one key aspect of television viewing: the amount of time viewers devote to it.

The curious tale of how Cesare Lombroso, the founder of criminology, met War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy to confirm his theory on how genius and madness were linked.

Malcolm Gladwell Has No Idea Why “The Tipping Point” Was A Hit.

I want to tell the story of the rise of the suburban poltergeist in factual TV from the 1970s onwards, how those reports inspired Ghostwatch…

David Hockney criticised Damien Hirst for the “insulting” use of assistants to create his works.

The Cuban Literacy Campaign was a year-long effort to abolish illiteracy in Cuba after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Before 1959 the official literacy rate for Cuba was between 60-76 %, with educational access in rural areas and a lack of instructors the main determining factor. By the completion of the campaign, 707,212 adults were taught to read and write, raising the national literacy rate to 96 %.

Two years after the Airbus 330 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, Air France 447’s flight-data recorders finally turned up. The revelations from the pilot transcript paint a surprising picture of chaos in the cockpit, and confusion between the pilots that led to the crash.

Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Stradivarius?

Bauhaus: How A Movement Failed to Protect Its Name.

Wilhelm Reich , the man who started the sexual revolution.

6 Pop Culture Visionaries Who Get Too Much Credit.

Barry Minkow. His many lives: entrepreneur, fraud fighter, pastor, movie actor - and serial swindler.

After ten years, the pesky 9/11 Truth movement has refined its arguments but still hasn’t proved the attacks were an inside job. Their key claims are refuted on multiple grounds.

Until 1912, there was no set design for the Stars and Stripes. And so, hidden in older versions of the flag, its makers laid hints of the country’s history and quest for identity.

The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a New Light.

15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent .

Child Bride Courtney Stodden and Creepy Old Husband Give Weirdest Interview Yet. [video, july 2011]

The latest completely useless Amnesty International ad.

Farrah Fawcett Barbie.

Sex is no accident. [video]

Supposedly this is a real photo of Michael Jackson drinking vodka straight out of the bottle with a female midget on each leg.

The Pleasure Throne.

Dog Doo Transmitter. [Thanks Cassandra!]

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time. I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to erase. Therefore I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum of erasure with the minimum of recomplication.

{ Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1979 | Continue reading }

If on a winter’s night a traveler begins with a chapter on the art and nature of reading, and is subsequently divided into twenty-two passages. The odd-numbered passages and the final passage are narrated in the second person. That is, they concern events purportedly happening to the novel’s reader. (Some contain further discussions about whether the man narrated as “you” is the same as the “you” who is actually reading.) These chapters concern the reader’s adventures in reading Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Eventually the reader meets a woman, who is also addressed in her own chapter, separately, and also in the second person.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

They call it “game transfer phenomenon,” or GTP. In a controversial study, they described a brief mental hiccup during which a person reacts in the real world the way they would in a game. For some people, reality itself seems to temporarily warp. Could this effect be real?

Most of us are gamers now. The stereotype of a guy living in his parents’ basement on a diet of Cheetos and soda is long gone. The average gamer is 34 years old, gainfully employed and around 40 per cent are female. They play, on average, 8 hours a week and not just on consoles; around half of the gaming activity today is on smartphones.

Still, the idea of Angry Birds spilling into reality does sound far-fetched. Indeed, if you read some of the descriptions of GTP, they can seem a little silly. After dropping his sandwich with the buttered side down, for example, one person interviewed said that he “instantly reached” for the “R2″ controller button he had been using to retrieve items within PlayStation games. “My middle finger twitched, trying to reach it,” he told the researchers. (…)

Half accused the researchers of disingenuously formalising idiosyncratic experiences reported by a small sample of 42 - that charge was countered by their subsequent study replicating the findings in 2000 gamers. The other half asked why Griffiths was rebranding a familiar finding. “They said, ‘we’ve known about this for ages’,” he recalls. “It’s called the Tetris effect.”

That term was coined in 1996 to refer to a peculiar effect caused by spending a long time moving the game’s falling blocks into place. Play long enough and you could encounter all sorts of strange hallucinatory residuals: some reported witnessing bathroom tiles trembling, for example, or a floor-to-ceiling bookcase lurching down the wall. In less extreme but far more common cases, people saw moving images at the edge of their visual field when they closed their eyes.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

photo { Arthur Tress }

In its 1915 decision in Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court held that motion pictures were, as a medium, unprotected by freedom of speech and press because they were mere “entertainment” and “spectacles” with a “capacity for evil.” Mutual legitimated an extensive regime of film censorship that existed until the 1950s. It was not until 1952, in Burstyn v. Wilson, that the Court declared motion pictures to be, like the traditional press, an important medium for the communication of ideas protected by the First Amendment. By the middle of the next decade, film censorship in the U.S. had been almost entirely abolished.

Why did the Court go from regarding the cinema as an unprotected medium to part of the constitutionally-protected “press”? The standard explanation for this shift is that civil libertarian developments in free speech jurisprudence in the 1930s and 40s made the changed First Amendment status of the movies and the fall of film censorship inevitable. Challenging this account, I argue that the shift was also the result of a dynamic I describe as the social convergence of mass communications. Social convergence takes place when the functions, practices, and cultures associated with different media come to resemble each other. By the 1950s, movies occupied a role in American culture that increasingly resembled the traditional press. At the same time, print journalism took on styles and functions that were like those historically associated with the movies. The demise of film censorship reflected not only more capacious understandings of freedom of expression, but also convergent communications. The article focuses on the efforts of a nationwide anticensorship movement, between 1915 and the 1950s, to engineer the reversal of Mutual using an argument based on media convergence.

This significant, lost chapter in the history of modern free speech has much to tell us about the ongoing relationship between the First Amendment and new media. It illustrates how courts and the public in an earlier time dealt with a question that is still pressing today: should the medium of communication have significance for free speech law? Illuminating historical patterns of judicial responses to new media, the work offers insights into what we may predict about the regulation of mass media in our own era of media convergence.

{ Samantha Barbas/SSRN | Continue reading }

{ via copyranter | more }

A new analysis of personality tests taken by 10,000 men and women in America has found there is only a 10% overlap between the sexes where they share the same kind of personalities.

(…)

Researchers, from Italy and the Manchester Business School, say the reason we think men and women are similar is that we have been using the wrong methods to assess them.

The personality test included 15 scales, collected under five headings: 



Extraversion (warmth, liveliness, social boldness, privateness and self reliance.

Anxiety (emotional stability, vigilance, apprehension and tension.)


Tough-mindedness (warmth, sensitivity, abstractedness and openness to change).


Independence (dominance, social boldness, vigilance and openness to change). 


Self Control (liveliness, rule-consciousness and perfectionism.)

When comparing men’s and women’s overall personality profiles using the new method very large differences between the sexes became apparent. (…)

“We believe we have made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated.”

Women scored higher than men on Sensitivity (sensitive, aesthetic, sentimental), Warmth (warm, outgoing and attentive to others) and Apprehension (apprehensive, self-doubting and worrying.)

Men outscored women on Dominance (dominant, forceful, aggressive) and Emotional Stability (emotionally stable, adaptive, mature).

{ Mirror | Continue reading | PLoS One | full paper }

Is losing weight as simple as doing a 15-minute writing exercise? In a new study published in Psychological Science, women who wrote about their most important values, like close relationships, music, or religion, lost more weight over the next few months than women who did not have that experience.

{ APS | Continue reading }

Given this importance of the flavors we learn to like, it seems to me remarkable, and unfortunate, that most people are unaware that the flavors are due mostly to the sense of smell and that they arise largely from smells we detect when we are breathing out with food in our mouths. (…)

The role of retronasal smell in flavor was finally put on the map by Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, in an article in 1982. As he phrased it, we need to recognize that smell is not a single sense but rather a dual sense, comprising orthonasal (breathing in) and retronasal (breathing out) senses. He devised experiments to show that the perception of the same odor is actually different depend­ing on which sense is being used. Subjects trained to recognize smells by sniffing them had difficulty recognizing them when they were introduced at the back of the mouth.


{ Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters | Continue reading }

Ed was devoted to his mother, who was quite demented and thoroughly disgusted with sex. She thought it was the world’s greatest evil so she preached to her two sons that they were to keep themselves pure.

When her husband died, she had even more influence, and then Ed’s brother died, leaving him alone with this delusional woman. Mildly retarded and mentally unstable, he was completely dependent on her. When she suffered a stroke that paralyzed her, he nursed her even as she verbally abused him. Sometimes he crawled into bed with her to cuddle.

Then when Ed was 39, his mother died. He could hardly bear it. He kept to the farm and spent his time doing odd jobs and reading magazines about headhunters, human anatomy, and the Nazis. He also contemplated sex-change surgery so he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin.

{ TruTV | Continue reading }

Searching Ed’s house, authorities found:

▪ Four noses
▪ Whole human bones and fragments
▪ Nine masks of human skin
▪ Bowls made from human skulls
▪ Ten female heads with the tops sawn off
▪ Human skin covering several chair seats
▪ Mary Hogan’s head in a paper bag
▪ Bernice Worden’s head in a burlap sack
▪ Nine vulvae in a shoe box
▪ A belt made from female human nipples
▪ Skulls on his bedposts
▪ A pair of lips on a draw string for a window-shade
▪ A lampshade made from the skin from a human face

These artifacts were photographed at the crime lab and then were properly destroyed.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }