December 2009 Archives

An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.

The particles showed as two tiny pulses of heat deposited over the course of two years in chunks of germanium and silicon that had been cooled to a temperature near absolute zero. But, the scientists said, there was more than a 20 percent chance that the pulses were caused by fluctuations in the background radioactivity of their cavern, so the results were tantalizing, but not definitive.

fed by sucking small animals out of the seafloor mud with its short snout and tongue, 

experts say.

Researchers say the 25 million-year-old fossil is related to today's blue whales - the largest animals on Earth.

The ancient animal's mud slurping may have been a precursor to the filter feeding seen in modern baleen whales.

These whales strain huge quantities of tiny marine animals through specialised "combs" which take the place of teeth.

The research is published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 

Curiously, the top three shelves of this "Teenage" section offer one paranormal-themed book after another.

This section is arranged so that an unsuspecting teen is easily lured into occult literature. The first book to catch the eye is called Godless, a book apparently written to shake a young person's faith in God. Nearby is You are So Dead to Me, a novel about a teen girl's use of occult powers to control zombies.

[...]

No photos accompany this story, since the owner warned our reporter not to take pictures. For the same reason, The Record is not even running a photo of the exterior of the store.

So why is Rita Moran, the owner of the store, wary of letting the public photograph the inside of Apple Valley Books?

The answer is provided by Rita Moran herself. Moran is Chairwoman of the Kennebec County Democratic Committee.  In the summer of 2007,  The Record revealed that Moran is a practitioner of the occult, and participates in occult rituals at a shrine dedicated to the goddess of witchcraft. 

[...]

Visitors to Rita Moran's bookstore will see that the occult is mixed in with the ordinary so as to almost be imperceptible. In the same way, the forces of darkness operate unnoticed in our civic life disguised as "marriage equality" (homosexual marriage) or "freedom of choice," (abortion) and few citizens are brave enough to call these practices what they really are - evil.

Image via Wikipedia

St Boniface (c. 672-754) [...] cut down the tree of Thor in order to disprove the legitimacy of the Norse gods to the local German tribe. St. Boniface saw a fir tree growing in the roots of the old oak. Taking this as a sign of the Christian faith, he said "...let Christ be at the center of your households..." using the fir tree as a symbol of Christianity. ^{[3] (from Wikipedia)}.

Numerous parallels have been drawn between Santa Claus and the figure of Odin, a major god amongst the Germanic peoples prior to their Christianization.[...] Odin was sometimes recorded, at the native Germanic holiday of Yule, as leading a great hunting party through the sky.^[16] Two books from Iceland, the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson, describe Odin as riding an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir that could leap great distances, giving rise to comparisons to Santa Claus's reindeer.^[17] Further, Odin was referred to by many names in Skaldic poetry, some of which describe his appearance or functions; these include Síðgrani,^[18] Síðskeggr,^[19] Langbarðr,^[20] (all meaning "long beard") and Jólnir^[21] ("Yule figure").

Image by riptheskull via Flickr

In Finland, the Shamans, and one in particular called Hold Nickar, are known to have worn red suits with white spots to pick the sacred Amanita Muscaria or Fly Agaric mushrooms, which are themselves red with white spots. On returning home from picking, on reindeer sleighs, they had their mushrooms in a sack, and re entered their lodges through the smoke hole in the roof ! Hold Nickar and friends ate those mushrooms to enter the Christ Consciousness, that's how he became Saint Nickar, or Saint Nicholas as we now know him !

The reindeer also ate the mushrooms, which is why they are characterized as flying, although this ties in with other older legends of gods flying the skies at night once a year giving gifts to the worthy. (read more)

Image via Wikipedia

Advanced computer technology tracks and digitally reproduces each slice [of H.M.'s brain]. An entire brain produces some 2,500 slices, and the amount of information in each one, once microscopic detail is added, will fill about a terabyte of computer storage. Computers at U.C.S.D. are now fitting all those pieces together for Mr. Molaison's brain, to create what Dr. Annese calls a "Google Earthlike search engine," the first entirely reconstructed, whole-brain atlas available to anyone who wants to log on.

"We're going to get the kind of resolution, all the way down to the level of single cells, that we have not had widely available before," said Donna Simmons, a visiting scholar at the Brain Architecture Center at the University of Southern California. The thin whole-brain slicing "will allow much better opportunities to study the connection between cells, the circuits themselves, which we have so much more to learn about."

Approaching from another angle, psychologist Dr. Russel T. Hurlburt is trying to understand the brain and the process of consciousness by creating instantaneous mental snapshots of subjects. The advanced technology he's employing to create these snapshots? Description.

Dr. Hurlburt, 64, presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day. In later interviews, she reconstructed these moments, often under rigorous cross-examination.

The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse.

On the third day of Melanie's experiment, as her boyfriend was asking her a question about insurance, she was trying to remember the word "periodontist." On the fourth day, she was having a strong urge to go scuba diving. On the sixth day, she was picking flower petals from the sink while hearing echoes of the phrase "nice long time" in her head.

Whether or not these efforts will lead to valuable conclusions or advances in understanding, I can't say, but they are certainly interesting projects. In light of the year 2000 predictions about 2010, I can't help but wonder what we'll know about the brain in 2020.

Before we cede the entire moral penthouse to "committed vegetarians" and "strong ethical vegans," we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants -- their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar -- the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It's time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.
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"Plants are not static or silly," said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. "They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk" through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. "These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals," Dr. Hilker said.

# "'Smellyvision' ... technology will be available to plant microchips loaded with chemicals into our TVs so we can enjoy the aromas that go with fashion, cookery, travel and gardening." -- The People newspaper, London

# Kids' dolls, trucks and other toys will use artificial intelligence to talk and "evolve" with your child as he grows, a process you'll be able to track dramatically with holographic photos. "Land line phones will be a thing of the past" and "there will probably be a single international currency." -- The Melbourne Herald Sun

# "Wearable computers ... will free many people from offices and ... commuting." -- PJ Wade, author, commentator, strategist and futurist

# "Universal preschool." -- The Oregonian