"Ketamine for depression and LSD for improving brain power; meet the lady who funds the science that no-one else will do, Amanda Feilding is on a mission to unlock the secrets of the mind" - Ryan via Bookmarklet
add psilocybin for migraines and for despair/depression - William Harryman
"David Pearce, the British philosopher, activist and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, is today's featured guest.
Topics include: Wireheading, recreational drugs, chewing coca leaves for micro-doses of cocaine, the abolition of suffering in all sentient life, veganism verses vegetarianism, why he is a founding member of the Order of Cosmic Engineers, the journal Medical Hypotheses, how he learned that he was a transhumanist, and how this lead to his co-founding of the World Transhumanist Association." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"mothers who report that they or their partner spanked their child in the past year are nearly three times more likely to state that they also used harsher forms of punishment than those who say their child was not spanked," - Ryan via Bookmarklet
I like this one : Take notes of your dreams. Keep a notebook by your bedside and record your dreams first thing in the morning or as you wake up from them , I never knew it. - raheleh
"Three months ago, after rethinking a previous series on race, genes, and intelligence, I sketched a way to think about race in the era of biology. Race is the stone age of genetics. Biologically, race is real. It's an extension of extended family. But it's also transitional and, in the long view, crude. Any theory of heredity that starts with observed racial patterns has to end with genetic differences that cross racial lines." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
Rudy Rucker: "For me, SF is the fun-loving hipster sister of Big Science. SF finds the vibby spots first. Sometimes the spots are gone in the morning, but sometimes there’s time for Big Science to trundle in the Measuring Machines and Theory Generators and capitalize on what we fey writer types have unearthed.
Here’s a more or less random list of some themes that I currently find appealing." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"A new study reveals part of the magic behind a diet rich in antioxidants, showing how artichokes, blueberries and pecans can hold at bay the leading cause of age-related blindness in developed countries." - Ryan
""Sleep may be the price you pay so your brain can be plastic the next day," Cirelli and Tononi say. Their hypothesis is that sleep allows the brain to regroup after a hard day of learning by giving the synapses, which increase in strength during the day, a chance to damp down to baseline levels. This is important because the brain uses up to 80 percent of its energy to sustain synaptic activity." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"A survey conducted by the Center for Inquiry shows that over 80% of atheists are male. What’s more, the same survey suggested that over 40% had at least a six-figure income." - Ryan
"That is, what Keeley refers to as the pacification of the past. In this chapter, Keeley explores how we went from a Hobbsian view of the past to a Neo-Rousseauian view and provides suggestions on where we go from here in terms of the anthropological study of war." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"But touch screens haven’t created much excitement as the main way for people to use things like phones or computers or other consumer electronics — until now. “Apple changed everybody’s mind about touch,”" - Ryan via Bookmarklet
""THIS data allows investigators to identify suspects, examine their contacts, establish relationships between conspirators and place them in a specific location at a certain time."" - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"The problem is drivers, who even at their most cautious and best intentioned are compromised by overconfidence, distractions, faulty visual perception and plain dumb mistakes. As local author Mary Roach ("Spook," "Stiff") wrote in her New York Times review of "Traffic," "An alternate title for the book might be 'Idiots.' "" - Ryan via Bookmarklet
Young people share the most intimate details of personal life on social-networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, portending a realignment of the public and the private - Ryan
"There's a gathering consensus that a new Green Revolution is needed — one that in addition to producing higher yields, is environmentally responsible and spurs economic growth in the developing world. Biotechnology, most scientists agree, must play a crucial role. But biotech, and genetic modification (GM) in particular, still faces profound public skepticism." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"Can we please stop fussing over every new Olympic record?
A new record means that an athlete using today's equipment outperformed an athlete using yesterday's equipment. It's not a fair fight." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
""Alternative medicine is not so much about the treatments we discuss in this book," the authors write, "but about the therapeutic relationship. Many alternative practitioners develop an excellent relationship with their patients that helps to maximize the placebo effect of an otherwise useless treatment."" - Ryan via Bookmarklet
the perceived direction of motion from a given visual object (in this case, red bars across a screen), depends on minute variations in the timing of an accompanying sound (a sequence of beeps, for example). This provides evidence that the brain’s integration of these visual and audio cues occurs at a very early stage of processing. - Ryan
"Mr Walters suffered a stroke at his home in 2005. But incredibly the cerebral haemorrhage turned out to be an astonishing piece of good fortune. For it 'rewired' part of his brain and spawned an artistic flair he never previously possessed." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"Shares of Canada's biggest oil sands companies posted solid gains on the stock market Wednesday amid reports that two of the world's richest men – Warren Buffett and Bill Gates – made a surprise visit to Alberta's oil sands earlier this week." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"Self-recognition, once thought to be an ability enjoyed only by select primates, has now been demonstrated in a bird. The finding has raised questions about part of the brain called the neocortex, something the self-aware magpie does not even posses" - Ryan
"After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nation" - Ryan
"Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors - where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin - can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone's trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so - tendencies that apply even more strongly if we've grown close." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"Changizi, however, theorizes that it is the visual system that compensates for the delay, effectively generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. This way, we are able to continually view the world in the present, rather than seeing what happened one-tenth of a second ago. His theory is called “perceiving the present.”" - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"Chemists today described the first identification of a specific "odor profile" for skin cancer, a discovery that could form the basis of a rapid, non-invasive test for diagnosing the most common type of cancer in the United States. The findings may enable doctors in the future to diagnose skin cancer quickly and accurately by waving a handheld scanner or sensor above the skin, they reported today at the 236th national meeting of the American Chemical Society." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
"One study conducted in Quebec in the 1980s found that black West African students had significantly higher amounts of "fast-twitch" muscle fibers—the kind that are responsible for short, explosive bursts of action—than white French Canadians did." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
some people got in serious trouble for talking about this research - the PC police refuse to believe there might be some genetic differences in people - William Harryman
Yep, no matter how tactful one is, no matter the intentions, no matter the strenth of argument, to even be open to group differences in X being partially a result of human genetic variation seems to invite accusations of being racist, which is almost impossible to defend oneself against. Susan Blackmore: Life would be easier, society would be fairer, racism would be easier to fight against, if there were no differences. But thousands of studies (including twin studies, adoption studies and much more) have shown differences between races in all sorts of abilities. - http://bit.ly/SwU5y - Ryan
"I have spent much of this year trying to get a handle on what is sometimes called Obamanomics and have come away thinking that Obama does have an economic ideology. It’s just not a completely familiar one. Depending on how you look at it, he is both more left-wing and more right-wing than many people realize." - Ryan via Bookmarklet
