The twist was that before each word and image appeared, the word “me” or “other” was flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds — long enough for participants to subliminally process the word but short enough that they could not consciously see it. The theory here, known as semantic association, is that when “me” precedes words or images that reflect your sexual orientation (for example, heterosexual images for a straight person), you will sort these images into the correct category faster than when “me” precedes words or images that are incongruent with your sexual orientation (for example, homosexual images for a straight person). This technique, adapted from similar tests used to assess attitudes like subconscious racial bias, reliably distinguishes between self-identified straight individuals and those who self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently rais

In one of your essays, you ask the question “Are we it?”—are we the final blossom of the human flower? What is your answer? 


Actually, my answer to “Are we it?” is to turn the assumption on its head. Considering that we are the only survivor of a diverse family tree—that is, an evolutionary tree characterized by lots of extinction—the notion that our twig is the final blossom of evolution is incredibly outdated. It’s incorrect no matter how ingrained it is in our thinking. Our amazing adaptability has allowed us to shape the environment to our own needs. This transformation has taken place in a remarkable period of climate stability, over the past 8,000 years or so. One deeply ironic result is that we have now narrowed our own options at a time when climate fluctuation appears to be increasing. Of an estimated 15,000 species of mammals and birds, fewer than 14 account for 90 percent of what we eat. Of more than 10,000 edible plants, three crops—wheat, rice, and corn—provide half the world’s calories. And through greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels, we’re pulling on the strings of the earth’s unstable climate.


By narrowing our options at a time of increasing instability, could we be inadvertently engineering our demise?


I see two possible scenarios for the future. We could change our current course and try to work carefully with the natural dynamics of the planet and the uncertainties of the environment, especially when it comes to our own inadvertent effects. Or we could continue shaping the earth in our own image, so to speak. We could theoretically, through engineering, create a membrane around the earth that controls temperature and rainfall, for instance. These two courses represent two very different views of the earth and our place on it. Whether the next chapter of the human story will be the last chapter may depend on the balance we strike between those two courses.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability and the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease, projected to reach second place by 2020. There is also strong evidence that it is an independent risk factor for heart disease, and several studies show that prolonged depression is associated with selective and possibly permanent damage to the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical to memory and learning.
Add the fact that 2 percent to 12 percent of depressed people eventually commit suicide, and the [supposed evolutionary] “advantages” of depression suddenly don’t look so good....
What is natural, the thinking goes, is best. If we are designed to suffer depression in response to life’s ills, there must be a good reason for it, and we should allow it to take its painful and natural course.
But unlike ordinary sadness, the natural course of depression can be devastating and lethal. And while sadness is useful, clinical depression signals a failure to adapt to stress or loss, because it impairs a person’s ability to solve the very dilemmas that triggered it.
Even if depression is “natural” and evolved from an emotional state that might once have given us some advantage, that doesn’t make it any more desirable than other maladies. Nature offers us cancer, infections and heart disease, which we happily avoid and do our best to treat. Depression is no different.

Dr. Money forced the twins to rehearse sexual acts involving "thrusting movements" with David playing the bottom role. As a child, David Reimer painfully recalled having to get "down on all fours" with his brother, Brian Reimer, "up behind his butt" with "his crotch against" his "buttocks". In another sexual position, Dr. Money forced David to have his "legs spread" with Brian on top. Dr. Money also forced the children to take their "clothes off" and engage in "genital inspections". On at "least one occasion", Dr. Money took a "photograph" of the two children doing these activities. Dr. Money's rationale for these various treatments was his belief that "childhood 'sexual rehearsal play'" was important for a "healthy adult gender identity".
For several years, Money reported on Reimer's progress as the "John/Joan case", describing apparently successful female gender development, and using this case to support the feasibility of sex reassignment and surgical reconstruction even in non-intersex cases. Money wrote: "The child's behavior is so clearly that of an active little girl and so different from the boyish ways of her twin brother." Notes by a former student at Money's lab state that during the followup visits, which occurred only once a year, Reimer's parents routinely lied to lab staff about the success of the procedure. The twin brother, Brian, later proved to be schizophrenic.
Reimer had experienced the visits to Baltimore as traumatic rather than therapeutic, and when Dr. Money started pressuring the family to bring him in for surgery during which a vagina would be constructed, the family discontinued the follow-up visits. From 22 months into his teenaged years Reimer urinated through a hole surgeons had placed in the abdomen. Estrogen was given during adolescence to induce breast development. Having no contact with the family once the visits were discontinued, John Money published nothing further about the case to suggest that the reassignment had not been successful.
Reimer's account, written with John Colapinto two decades later, described how - contrary to Money's reports - when living as Brenda, Reimer did not identify as a girl. He was ostracized and bullied by peers, and neither frilly dresses (which he was forced to wear during frigid Winnipeg winters) nor female hormones made him feel female. By the age of 13, Reimer was experiencing suicidal depression, and told his parents he would commit suicide if they made him see John Money again. In 1980, Reimer's parents told him the truth about his gender reassignment, following advice from Reimer's endocrinologist and psychiatrist. At 14, Reimer decided to assume a male gender identity, calling himself David.

David Reimer was born an identical (non-intersex) twin boy in 1965. At the age of 8 months, David and his brother each had a minor medical problem involving his penis, and a doctor decided to treat the problem with circumcision. The doctor botched the circumcision on David, using an inappropriate method and accidentally burning off virtually all of David’s penis. At the advice of psychologist John Money at Johns Hopkins University, David’s parents agreed to have him “sex reassigned” and made into a girl via surgical, hormonal, and psychological treatments—i.e., via the system Money advocated for intersex children.

For many years, John Money claimed that David (known in the interim as “Brenda”) turned out to be a “real” girl with a female gender identity. Money used this case to bolster his approach to intersex —the approach that is still used throughout much of the U.S. and developed world—one that relies on the assumption that gender identity is all about nurture (upbringing), not nature (inborn traits), and that gender assignment is the key to treating all children with atypical sex anatomies.

As it turns out, Money was lying. He knew Brenda was never happy as a girl, and he knew that as soon as David found out what happened to him, David reassumed the social identity of a boy.

The case of David Reimer has been used by the proponents of the “gender is inborn” (nature) theory as proof that they are right. We like to point out that what the story of David Reimer teaches us most clearly is how much people are harmed by being lied to and treated in inhumane ways. We don’t think we can ever predict, with absolute certainty, what gender identity a person will grow up to have. What we can predict with a good degree of certainty is that children who are treated with shame, secrecy, and lies will suffer at the hands of medical providers who may think they have the best of intentions and the best of theories.

We are, after all, Darwinian survivors. Our everyday reasoning abilities have evolved to cope efficiently with a complex and dynamic environment. They are thus likely to be adaptive in this environment, even if they can be tripped up in the psychologist’s somewhat artificial experiments. Where do the norms of rationality come from, if they are not an idealization of the way humans actually reason in their ordinary lives??....
Kahneman [supplies a fascinating account of what might be taken to be the goal of rationality]: happiness.... When Kahneman first took up [the question of happiness, most] research relied on asking people how satisfied they were with their life on the whole. But such retrospective assessments depend on memory, which is notoriously unreliable. What if, instead, a person’s actual experience of pleasure or pain could be sampled from moment to moment, and then summed up over time? Kahneman calls this “experienced” well-being, as opposed to [“remembered” well-being....T]he remembering self does not care about duration[—it retrospectively rates an experience by its peak level of pain or pleasure, and by how it] ends...
["D]uration neglect” and the “peak-end rule” — were strikingly illustrated in one of Kahneman’s more harrowing experiments. Two groups of patients were to undergo painful colonoscopies. The patients in Group A got the normal procedure. So did the patients in Group B, except — without their being told — a few extra minutes of mild discomfort were added after the end of the examination. Which group suffered more? Well, Group B endured all the pain that Group A did, and then some. But since the prolonging of Group B’s colonoscopies meant that the procedure ended less painfully, the patients in this group retrospectively minded it less....
The remembering self exercises a sort of “tyranny” over the voiceless experiencing self. “Odd as it may seem,” Kahneman writes, “I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me"....
There may be no experiencing self at all. Brain-scanning experiments by Rafael Malach and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute in Israel...have shown that when subjects are absorbed in an experience, like watching the “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the parts of the brain associated with self-consciousness are not merely quiet, they’re actually shut down (“inhibited”) by the rest of the brain. The self seems simply to disappear. Then who exactly is enjoying the film? And why should such egoless pleasures enter into the decision calculus of the remembering self?
Clearly, much remains to be done in hedonic psychology. But Kahneman’s conceptual innovations have laid the foundation for many of the empirical findings he reports in this book: that while French mothers spend less time with their children than American mothers, they enjoy it more; that headaches are hedonically harder on the poor; that women who live alone seem to enjoy the same level of well-being as women who live with a mate; and that a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas of the country is sufficient to maximize happiness.

[Investigators, to their surprise, found that education and an active mind] offered no protection...Instead, they found hints that Alzheimer's disease could have already begun in some women by the time they entered the convent.
The nuns whose sentences were grammatically complex and packed with ideas when they were in their 20's remained sharp of mind when they were in their 80's. In contrast, almost all those whose sentences were simple and comparatively devoid of complex grammatical constructions were demented six decades later. [Without knowing the fate of the writer of each sample, researchers could] predict with 90% accuracy which ones would develop Alzheimer's disease when they were old...
[The nuns] lived together in the same environment for 60 years, so vagaries of diet or other environmental influences did not affect their risk]....
The most telling linguistic feature was idea density, a measurement imported from the field of psycholinguistics that looks at how many ideas are in a given piece of writing. [Researchers measured idea density] to categorize texts according to how difficult they are to read and understand....
"To me, it was the most bizarre finding on earth," [author James] Mortimer said. But he added that he was now convinced that Alzheimer's disease might well be "a lifelong disease," one that progresses very slowly and manifests itself as dementia only when a certain threshold in brain damage is reached....
Other researchers said they had also struggled with disbelief when they learned of the study results but found the research design elegant and the evidence compelling. Many said the study might mark a turning point in the way researchers think about Alzheimer's disease....
Dr. Neil Buckholtz [of the National Institute on Aging] cautioned that the results might not mean that Alzheimer's disease starts when people are in their 20's. Another hypothesis [is] "a difference in the brains of these two groups [that interacts with an Alzheimer's process that may occur later...Whatever] the process of Alzheimer's disease is, it occurs earlier than the symptoms...[We really don't know] how far back it goes."
[The study's conclusions fit with research by Tomas G. Ohm et al. who examined 887 brains of people 20 to 104 years old and reported] that neurofibrillary tangles, the pathological changes characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, could be present even when people were 20 years old.
In a recent paper published in Neuroscience, the German group concluded that "the deep roots of Alzheimer's disease-related neurofibrillary changes can be traced about 50 years back and may even extend into adolescence."
[Dr. David A. Snowden] and his colleagues had begun their research expecting that nuns who had spent their lives teaching would be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than those with a high school education or less who had handled household chores at the convent.
But the researchers found no such effect. When the investigators restricted their analysis of the writing samples to the 85 nuns with college degrees, "the results were just as striking," Dr. Snowden said.
[Psycholinguist and study author Susan J.] Kemper said it was not yet known whether idea density was related to intelligence or to measures like verbal scores on college entrance exams or an ability to do well on analogies tests...
The investigators also looked at the nuns' writings when they were older to see if the idea density in their writings remained constant. It did. Those with the prose rated most dense in ideas when they were 20 had the most idea-dense prose when they were 80, and vice versa....
The investigators are also working with Dr. Allen D. Roses of Duke University to see if one genetic risk factor, the inheritance of apo E4 genes, was more prevalent among the nuns whose writings had low idea densities.
One thing the study shows, Dr. Roses said, is that "we ought to be less seriously wed to our beloved hypotheses."

In a study of more than 4,000 black women in Los Angeles, those...living in neighborhoods with high levels of nitrogen oxides, pollutants found in traffic exhaust, were 25% more likely to develop diabetes and 14% more likely to develop hypertension than those living in sections with cleaner air.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, forty-four percent of all black women in the U.S. have high blood pressure and about 11% have diabetes, compared with 28% and roughly 7%, respectively, of white women. Black Americans are also exposed to higher levels of air pollution than white Americans...
The findings on their relative risks for those conditions take into account several other potential influences, including how heavy the women were, whether they smoked and other stressors, including noise levels at participants' homes.
The researchers measured average pollution levels near participants' homes for only one year and the patterns remained relatively constant over the entire study period. While Dr. Coogan and her colleagues estimated nitrogen oxide concentrations near participants' homes, they did not account for commuting habits or exposure to air pollution at work...Americans, on average, spend about 70% of their time at home.
In addition to measuring nitrogen oxides, a proxy for traffic pollution, the researchers evaluated levels of fine particulate matter. Women who lived in areas with higher fine particulate exposures also faced an increased risk of diabetes and high blood pressure, although statistically the link was weak and could have been due to chance.
Previous reports have suggested that air pollution particles small enough to make their way into the bloodstream may contribute to a narrowing of blood vessels, which can lead to high blood pressure and reduce sensitivity to insulin.

The big bang was first and foremost a theory of the universe's evolution. It told a story of a Universe that was once in a state of extreme compression and extreme temperature, a universe that expanded like the skin of an inflating balloon into the relatively empty and relatively cold state we see today. <br />
This story of "after," built on a mix of particle physics and Einstein's classical theory of relativity, has been an astonishing triumph. A hundred years ago the evolution of the universe used to be a foggy territory, half physics and half philosophy. Now we can run the clock on cosmic history back to fractions of a second after its expansion began and be confident the story we tell is correct. <br />
But as a theory of the beginning itself[—]some kind of genesis—the big bang was never very helpful. If you run the idea backward far enough, space and, most importantly, time just disappear into an explosion of infinities that essentially tell you that you have gone too far.

What does it take to expand the analysis of literary sources into an analysis of the larger society which produced and consumed those sources?....Is there a quantifiable or verifiable way of studying a text's influence? And to what extent can printed sources written for the lower classes be used as evidence for the opinions and views of those classes? Those are some of the questions which Stuart Semmel's Napoleon and the British raises....<br />
It is generally accepted that the people of Britain hated and despised Napoleon; that they did so since the time of his invasion of Egypt; and that that hatred intensified (not without reason) throughout the Napoleonic wars. Even today, English biographers of Napoleon are more critical than French biographers. At first glance, the topic seems hardly worthy of an article, let alone a full book. But things were not so simple, as Semmel proves. There was a strong current of English...thought that supported Napoleon.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities.

[Geophagy in primates is widespread and] presumed to be important to health and nutrition. [We make here] a preliminary assessment of 6 nonexclusive hypotheses[. Geophagy may alleviate gastrointestinal upset: (1) soils adsorb toxins such as phenolics and secondary metabolites; (2) soil acts as an antacid and adjusts the gut pH; (3) soils act as an antidiarrhoeal; and (4) soils counteract the effects of endoparasites. Geophagy may supplement] minerals and/or elements: (5) soils supplement nutrient-poor diets and (6) soils provide extra iron at high altitudes. [Geophagy may] satiate olfactory senses, serve as a famine food and finally may have no function at all. We [assess these hypotheses and suggest tests to understand the function of geophagy. Primates seem to] engage in geophagy for a number of reasons that are nonexclusive. We conclude that mineral supplementation, adsorption of toxins, treatment of diarrhoea and pH adjustment of the gut seem the most plausible [explanations].

This essay [was composed by Lillian S. Robinson as she was] struggling through the final stages of ovarian cancer. Douglas Michael Massing, her friend and former assistant, helped Robinson as she worked on this project from her hospital bed, and he arranged the results of her composition into the text below. The text comprises Robinson's own words, and she orally approved a draft of it that was read back to her, although with the hope that she could continue to work on what she saw as an essay in progress. Massing wrote the endnotes and afterword, which provide some clarification and context. I have edited it very lightly...[My goal was] to translate what had been composed in an oral format into the medium of print, while interfering as little as possible with Robinson's voice. In making these changes I have consulted with Massing and with Lillian Robinson's nephew and literary executor, Greg Robinson...I thank them both for entrusting [TSWL] with Lillian's last publication...

Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature<br />
Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 2007<br />
Special Issue: The Silver Jubilee Issue: What We Have Done & Where We Are Going<br />
CONTENTS<br />
<br />
* Stevens, Laura M. From the Editor<br />
[Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF] <br />
<br />
Articles<br />
....<br />
Robinson, Lillian S.<br />
* Massing, Douglas Michael. Treason Our Text: A Preposthumous View<br />
[Access article in HTML] [Access article in PDF]<br />
Subject Headings:<br />
o Robinson, Lillian S. Treason our text: feminist challenges to the literary canon.<br />
o Feminism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

But there was no playtime in Ulster in the 1970's. "Next to the fresh grave of my beloved grandmother," wrote Paul Durcan in his poem Ireland 1972, "The grave of my firstlove murdered by my brother." Yet little boys on their holidays knew nothing of such internecine realities. <br />
What I had become familiar with on these car journeys were the police stations and barracks that we passed. Of course, I had no idea at the time what function these buildings served but I sensed that their purpose could only be sinister. A building that had to protected by a carapace of wire mesh and razor wire was no ordinary domicile. I had never seen anything like these buildings before. With their tiaras of radio masts and satellite dish jewellery, they were other worldly creations set in the "terrible beauty" of Northern Ireland. <br />
It was these buildings, their presence ideologically transgressing the landscape and streets, that the photographer, Jonathan Olley, took a professional interest in.

Discovery of 14,100- to 14,600-year-old stone tools at a site in Monte Verde, Chile, raised questions about just how...the new settlers could have arrived so far south so quickly. These early people might have used the two continents' west coast as a pathway to settlement but, [that would have required early explorers to be] "paddling as fast as they could to get down to the southern tip of South America," passing up a lot of awfully nice places on the North American coast along the way—such as the Columbia River, San Francisco Bay and San Diego, "where I would have stopped".... <br />
Given the previous finds in Wisconsin, Chile and other sites, John Shea [of Stony Brook University] notes that "it's been pretty clear" that humans were living in the Americas long before the Clovis tradition emerged.<br />
Likewise, [Douglas Bamforth of University of Colorado Boulder was not surprised by] the new evidence. "I think it's kind of been waiting to be found," he says of a substantial pre-Clovis site.

[Dr. Michael Fitzgerald notes that as Wain's art became more abstract], his technique and skill as a painter did not diminish as one would expect from a schizophrenic...[Elements of visual agnosia—a key element in some cases of AS—may have manifested itself in Wain's] extreme attention to detail. <br />
A series of five of his paintings is commonly used as an example in psychology textbooks to putatively show the change in his style as his psychological condition deteriorated. However, it is not known if these works were created in the order usually presented, as Wain did not date them. Rodney Dale, author of Louis Wain: The Man Who Drew Cats, has criticised the belief that the five paintings can be used as an example of Wain's deteriorating mental health, writing: "Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] 'later' productions which are patterns rather than cats."

Superoxide may contribute to the pathogenesis of many diseases (the evidence is particularly strong for radiation poisoning and hyperoxic injury), and perhaps also to aging via the oxidative damage that it inflicts on cells. While the action of superoxide in the pathogenesis of some conditions is strong, for instance, mice and rats overexpressing CuZnSOD or MnSOD are more resistant to strokes and heart attacks, the role of superoxide in aging must be regarded as unproven for now. In model organisms (yeast, the fruit fly Drosophila and mice), genetically knocking out CuZnSOD shortens lifespan and accelerates certain features of aging (cataracts, muscle atrophy, macular degeneration, thymic involution), but the converse, increasing the levels of CuZnSOD, does not seem (except perhaps in Drosophila), to consistently increase lifespan.[5] The most widely accepted view is that oxidative damage (derived amongst other factors, from superoxide) is but one of several factors limiting lifespan.

RT @JPBarlow: RT @warrenellis Titanic being devoured by extremophile super-organism using microbial "language"

RT @ebertchicago: A trillion years from now, astronomers are going to have their work cut out for them.

Congress does not have to borrow—and can stop Treasury from doing so. But if Congress authorizes the expenditures, Article I has only one other way out: raising taxes. <br />
With federal tax revenues now less than 20% of gross domestic product, the US has some of the lowest tax rates in the so-called First World...<br />
In Article I, the power to borrow merely complements the power to tax, as a way to pay for the expenses Congress has authorized. <br />
[Under the Fifth Amendment, default would] be a taking of property—the bondholders’—without due process of law. No Treasury bond reads “subject to the debt ceiling.” The Fifth Amendment is supposed to be the darling of the Federalist Society. Where is it on this one? <br />
Section 4 of the 14th Amendment states, in part: “The validity of the public debt, authorized by law … shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The stability of marriage and the sanctity of personal liberty are the foundations of conservative values.... <br />
[Heterosexual marriage is not] threatened by gays and lesbians getting married. There will be the same number of heterosexual marriages, divorces and children born. Churches can choose not to marry same-sex couples, and churches that do have the religious freedom to perform those ceremonies. <br />
Whether or not you agree with gay marriage, we're all joined by our love of liberty. Free citizens are allowed to disagree and live their lives as they choose without fear of government reprisal as long as life and property are not threatened. <br />
The tenor of this debate does not serve the people Iowa well, and is not in keeping with an Iowa culture known nationwide for displaying respect and generosity of spirit. Each day, Iowans worship with, work with, live with, and love people who are gay. Together we make a great state, facing the same problems and, hopefully, the same bright future.

[We] choose our favorite movie stars before we turn 18. They take possession of our imaginations while we're still trying on role models. By the time we're out of high school, we're essentially who we'll be for the rest of our lives, and although new movie stars are created every year, they will never have the same resonance of someone we fixed on earlier....<br />
Movies enter our minds more directly when we're young....There's a difference between empathizing with a character and identifying with a star. When we start going to the movies, stars are leading surrogate lives for us. At the risk of tasking you with my infantile fantasies, I was, for a period of hours, John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or James Stewart....I was not only in lust with Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, but in some way I absorbed their appeal and shared with them the knowledge that they were desired. They let me imagine how it felt to be longed for...a knowledge sadly lacking in my real life.

tumblr_lhjr7uaFmX1qgzw98o1_500.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x307 pixels)

Much of what we see in “Metropolis'' doesn't exist, except in visual trickery. The special effects were the work of Eugene Schufftan, who later worked in Hollywood as the cinematographer of “Lilith'' and “The Hustler",,,[H]is photographic system “allowed people and miniature sets to be combined in a single shot, through the use of mirrors, rather than laboratory work.'' Other effects were created in the camera by cinematographer Karl Freund.... <br />
Without all of the digital tricks of today, “Metropolis'' fills the imagination. Today, the effects look like effects, but that's their appeal. Looking at the original “King Kong,” I find that its effects, primitive by modern standards, gain a certain weird effectiveness. Because they look odd and unworldly compared to the slick, utterly convincing effects that are now possible, they're more evocative: The effects in modern movies are done so well that we seem to be looking at real things, which is not quite the same kind of fun.

RT @pourmecoffee: Why are easy decisions so hard? People confuse variety of options with importance. (Cold medicine!)

Gene-primacy seeps into coverage of science {when new studies using molecular techniques are said to confirm old] studies using more traditional methods[:] see how the hypothesis of butterfly migration and speciation by Nabokov was said to have been confirmed by a recent molecular study. But molecular techniques are new, still being tested, calibrated and evaluated. The Nabokov story is really about well done work from the past using [tested and] reliable techniques, that was strengthened by the new study and in turn validated the molecular method. Comparative anatomy is what validated the genetic method, not the other way round... <br />
[I]n this example in clocks, it is very nice that new techniques repeated the old results. Each strengthens the other. The new study does not confirm the old as much as they all confirm each other. But for those enamored with molecules (or those who always think that new is better than old), this duo of papers will seal the deal if the old papers did not.

The question of what is going on in your head as you experience...the life all around you has baffled so many great minds that it is known simply as "the hard problem". <br />
Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake up.... <br />
[Psychologhist Nicholas Humphrey claims] people have been looking in the wrong place[:] "Scientists and philosophers have assumed all along that consciousness is somehow helping us think better, somehow improving our intelligence or our cognitive skills"...<br />
Consciousness, he argues in his book Soul Dust, is not so much about thinking, but rather the way our brain generates for itself powerful feelings, colours, sounds and smells with you at the centre[:] "Consciousness is a kind of theatre...We generate this magical mystery show in order to enchant the world and to give ourselves a sense of our own importance and place in it."

For reasons lost in the mists of evolution, a mutation in a gene called CMAH occurred about 2 to 3 million years ago, inactivating an enzyme in humans that catalyzes production of Neu5Gc by adding a single oxygen atom to Neu5Ac....<br />
Kim’s group compared mice with a functional CMAH gene to mice with a human-like mutation in CMAH[, developed by earlier researchers. Fed a high-fat diet, m]ice in both groups became obese and developed insulin resistance. [O]nly mice with the CMAH gene mutation experienced pancreatic beta cell failure.... <br />
[T]he findings help refine understanding of why obese humans appear to be particularly vulnerable to type 2 diabetes, and also suggest that current animal models used to study diabetes may not accurately mirror the human condition. In clinical terms...further research to determine how sialic acid composition affects pancreatic beta cell function may reveal new strategies to preserve the cells, improve insulin production and prevent diabetes.

Although an increase in brain glucose metabolism happens during normal brain function, the question is whether repeated artificial stimulation as a result of exposure to electromagnetic radiation might have a detrimental effect.
Although speculative, one theory about how an artificial increase in brain glucose metabolism could be harmful is that it could potentially lead to the creation of molecules called free radicals, which in excess can damage healthy cells. Or it may be that repeated stimulation by electromagnetic radiation could set off an inflammatory response, which studies suggest is associated with a number of heath problems, including cancer.
Among cancer researchers and others interested in the health effects of cellphones, the study, listed in the medical journal under the heading “Preliminary Communications,” was met with enthusiasm because of the credibility of the researchers behind it and the careful methods used.
“The bottom line is that it adds to the concern that cellphone use could be a health hazard,” said [commentator] Dr. Lai. “Everybody is worried about brain cancer, and the jury is still out on that question. There are actually quite a lot of studies showing cellphone radiation associated with other events, like sleep disturbances. But people have not been paying a lot of attention to these other types of studies.”
[Researcher] Dr. Volkow said future research may even show that the electromagnetic waves emitted from cellphones could be used to stimulate the brain for therapeutic reasons. She said the research should not set off alarms about cellphone use because simple precautions like using a headset or earpiece can alleviate any concern.

The stethoscope let doctors realize that what had been thought of as 17 conditions—like coughing up blood and shortness of breath—could all be different symptoms of the same disease, tuberculosis. <br />
“The advent of the stethoscope made it possible to unify tuberculosis,” said Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a professor of the history of medicine at Queen's University in Ontario. <br />
The shift from symptoms to anatomical measurements had big implications for patients[, said Dr. Duffin:] “Up until the 18th century, you had to feel sick to be sick"...But now people can be considered sick based on measurements like high blood pressure without feeling ill at all. <br />
Indeed, Dr. Duffin said, people who feel sick nowadays “don’t get to have a disease unless the doctor can find something” and instead might be told that it’s all in their head. Doctors argue, for instance, about whether fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, which have no obvious anatomical causes, are really diseases.

[A useful summary and example of limitations of research method and inference. Membership site.—DMM]<br />
"This enthusiasm is predicated upon data from observational studies—which are subject to confounding, and are hypothesis-generating rather than hypothesis-testing—rather than randomized controlled trials...Calls for widespread vitamin D supplementation are premature on the basis of current evidence."<br />
[In a study of almost 3,200 Finnish men and women aged 50 to 79 who did not have Parkinson's disease, over 29 years of follow-up, 50 people developed Parkinson's. P]eople with the highest levels of vitamin D had a 67% lower risk of developing Parkinson's...compared with those with the lowest levels of vitamin D.<br />
"In conclusion, our results are in line with the hypothesis that low vitamin D status predicts the development of Parkinson's disease...Because of the small number of cases and the possibility of residual [factors that might influence the results], large cohort studies are needed."

Young queer men in particular need to see “We Were Here.” They need to gain an understanding of the horrors of HIV/AIDS to educate themselves and avoid going through something a generation of queer men had no choice in experiencing. Men who have sex with men are still the largest demographic of newly infected people in the United States. While we represent 2-5% of the US population, we have an HIV diagnosis rate more than 44 times that of other men, and more than 40 times that of women. We account for more than half of all new HIV infections in the United States and nearly 30,000 of us are newly infected with HIV each year. We are the only risk group with increasing annual numbers of new HIV infections. From 2005-2008, estimated diagnoses of HIV increased approximately 17% among men who have sex with men.... <br />
Independent film in particular was one of the greatest assets I ever had in my own HIV/AIDS education, and in simply understanding where I came from.

The New World species shared a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago. But many New World species were more closely related to Old World butterflies than to their neighbors...[F]ive waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World—just as Nabokov had speculated. <br />
“By God, he got every one right...I couldn’t get over it—I was blown away.” <br />
Dr. Pierce and her colleagues also investigated Nabokov’s idea that the butterflies had come over the Bering Strait. The land surrounding the strait was relatively warm 10 million years ago, and has been chilling steadily ever since...[T]he first lineage of Polyommatus blues that made the journey could survive a temperature range that matched the Bering climate of 10 million years ago. The lineages that came later are more cold-hardy, each with a temperature range matching the falling temperatures....<br />
"What a great paper...[T]he most modern methods that technology can deliver now largely support [Nabokov's] systematic arrangement."

According to Freedom House's 2010 annual report, 89 of the world's 194 nations, representing less than half of the global population, are free; another 58 are "partly free." People were "not free” in 47 countries, home to 34 percent of the global population; a single nation, China, accounted for roughly half of this percentage.<br />
<br />
The report warns that for "the fourth consecutive year, declines [in freedom] have trumped gains." Set-backs were especially severe in Latin America, Africa, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Although the U.S. has orchestrated elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, Freedom House categorizes these nations as "not free."<br />
<br />
The report points out, however, that "the overall state of freedom in the world has improved over the last two decades. Many more countries were in the 'free' category and were designated as electoral democracies in 2009 than in 1989, and the majority of countries that made major progress 20 years ago have retained those improvements."

As the 19th century wore on, several trends promoted a new idea of generations, of a society divided into different categories of people based on age. These trends were all related to the process of modernisation, industrialisation, or westernisation, which had been changing the face of Europe since the mid-eighteenth century. One was a change in mentality about time and social change. The increasing prevalence of enlightenment ideas encouraged the idea that society and life were changeable, and that civilization could progress. This encouraged the equation of youth with social renewal and change. Political rhetoric in the 19th century often focused on the renewing power of youth influenced by movements such as Young Italy, Young Germany, Sturm und Drang, the German Youth Movement, and other romantic movements. By the end of the 19th century European intellectuals were disposed toward thinking of the world in generational terms, and in terms of youth rebellion and emancipation.

There is no danger from the star if and when it explodes. [It’s too far away to do us any] harm; a supernova would have to be within 25 light years or so before it would start to do measurable damage to Earth, and...much closer before that harm rose to the level of actual danger. <br />
At 600+ light years, a supernova would be pretty bright, but hardly bright enough to be a second Sun...It wouldn’t even be as bright as the full Moon, really, but certainly far brighter than Venus. Enough to cast a shadow, which would actually be pretty cool.... <br />
[A close supernova] would be a huge boon to astronomy. The ones we see are all so far away that details are too small to detect...one that close would be like having it under the microscope...[I]t would be so bright astronomers would have a hard time using their best equipment, which would get swamped with all that light. I wonder how many amateur astronomers would suddenly find themselves able to do science the professionals couldn’t.

[At a conference in Istanbul of philosophers and theologians from North America and Turkey, a riich portrait (among many} emerged] of first-century Alexandria, where the Neoplatonism of the Jewish philosopher Philo directly influenced the early Christians Clement and Origen, [and laid] the foundations of Islamic philosophy through al-Kindi and al-Farabi. [This kind of influence is obscured] by a focus on “Western Civilization” that favors Athens and Rome to Alexandria and treats Origen only as a precursor to [St. Augustine,] supposed inventor of an exclusively Christian syncretism between philosophy and theology. <br />
[The world is everywhere richly textured] in a complex interweaving that defies the narrow confines of vernacular or hemispheric bounds. Our task as humanists of the twenty-first century is to make those long and deep traditions visible, and to do so in the teeth of those forces that would strip them away, be those forces technological, commercial, political, or intellectual.

I stood in a long line for the men's room during a coffee break. The women's room next door was empty. I thought how only at a meeting like the Singularity Summit would I find myself in this situation....<br />
[Boyden's team wanted to make mouse retinal neurons blind due to mutation sensitive to light]. They loaded genes for light-sensitive channels onto viruses and injected [the mice, targeting retinal neurons in hopes that the eyes would incorporate the genes and make channels to replace their own missing receptors. They put the mice into a little pool with a maze of barriers.]. At one end of the pool the mice could get out of the water by climbing onto an illuminated platform. Regular mice quickly followed the light to the platform while blind mice swam around randomly. When Boyden and his colleagues put the mice infected with neuron channels in the pool, they headed for the exit almost as often as the healthy mice. As far as Boyden and his colleagues can tell, the mice can see again.

Treason Our Text: A Preposthumous View Lillian S. Robinson Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University With Douglas Michael Massing San Francisco State University This essay is unfinished because it was composed by Lillian S. Robinson as she was in the palliative care unit, struggling through the final stages of ovarian cancer. Douglas Michael Massing, her friend and former assistant, helped Robinson as she worked on this project from her hospital bed, and he arranged the results of her composition into the text below. The text comprises Robinson's own words, and she orally approved a draft of it that was read back to her, although with the hope that she could continue to work on what she saw as an essay in progress. Massing wrote the endnotes and afterword, which provide some clarification and context. I have edited it very lightly....In making these changes I have consulted with Massing and with Lillian Robinson's nephew and literary [executor.]

So it is with video games, so it is with Roger Ebert, who admits that, though he does not see games as art, there is no reason he should. Something does not become artistic to you because others say it is, only because you appreciate it yourself. You can say that the Mona Lisa is art because history has declared it to be so, but do you, yourself, see what is artistic about it, specifically? How much of that understanding springs from your knowledge of what it does that others in its form do not? That context is essential, and Ebert admits that he lacks it and has no desire to obtain it. The war can end, now.

Penrose and Gurzadyan say they have identified regions in the microwave sky where there are concentric circles showing the radiation’s temperature is markedly smaller than elsewhere[, allowing] us to “see through” the Big Bang into the aeon that would have existed beforehand. The circles were created when black holes “encountered” or collided with a previous aeon.
“Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky...of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low.”
And these circles don’t [jibe] with the idea of inflation, [which] proposes that the distribution of temperature variations across the sky should be Gaussian, or random, rather than having discernable structures within it.
Penrose and Gurzadyan say that...black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe.

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/ syndicated to a scifi/fantasy site

[Killer of Sheep] doesn't come, as most films do, with built-in instructions about how to view it. One scene follows another with no apparent pattern[;] the lives of its family combine endless routine with the interruptions of random events. The day they all pile into a car to go to the races...a lesser film would have had them winning or losing. In this film, they have a flat tire, and no spare. Thus does poverty become your companion on every journey....
One brilliant sequence shows a kid's head darting out from behind a plywood shield—once, twice, six times. The camera pulls back to show that two groups of kids are playing at war in a rubbish-strewn wasteland, throwing rocks at one another from behind barriers. A boy gets hit and bleeds and cries. The others forget war and gather around. He's not too badly hurt, and so they idly drift over to railroad tracks and throw rocks at a passing train. All of the scenes of children at play were unrehearsed; Burnett just filmed them.

Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet Earth, only 4 per cent of that universe is known -- because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy
Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors -- and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe -- to establish when and how they come together and what shapes they take.
The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing -- presumably into them -- and then back into the classical four.
Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated -- a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.

This good informal discussion can serve as an introduction to media criticism and consumption issues, commodification, and appropriation of rhetoric. Some participants linked to other online discussion, or were moved to publish their own thoughts.—DMM

Different [research] tools are valuable in different situations, and sometimes, even very tiny numbers of people can give you a meaningful piece of information: even an anecdote can be informative.
For example, if you produced a research paper about just two people who had gone into space, in a rocket or in a space shuttle, and then an extra eye had physically opened in the centre of their forehead, I would be concerned. That’s because going into space is a very rare lifestyle risk exposure: maybe a thousand people in total. And I’ve never seen a third eye physically open in the centre of someone’s forehead.
In this context, even though there are just two anecdotes, even though they are unsystematically gathered, it’s still interesting information, because the exposure and the outcome are both very rare, and because this is the first information available on the issue. I would want to look into it more carefully, and more systematically, but these anecdotes are still useful evidence.

This section of Science-Based Medicine is dedicated to reference resources for major topics and issues relevant to science and medicine. For each topic we will give a concise overview followed by an index of SBM posts on the topic, and key outside resources. We will also list important peer-reviewed research relating to the topic with a brief description of the findings.

This is meant as a resource for the public, for health care professionals, writers, journalists and other members of the media.

There are probably multiple—and no doubt very complicated—developmental routes to adult homosexuality. Heritable, biological factors interact with environmental experiences to produce phenotypic outcomes, and this is no less true for sexual orientation than it is for any other within-population variable. Since the prospective and retrospective data...often reveal very early emerging traits in prehomosexuals...those children who show pronounced sex-atypical behaviors may have “more” of a genetic loading to their homosexuality, whereas gay adults who were sex-typical as children might trace their homosexuality more directly to particular childhood experiences....[C]ontroversial new findings published earlier this year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior hint intriguingly that men—but not women—who were sexually abused as children are significantly more likely than non-abused males to have had homosexual relationships as adults.

Why do we find ourselves in this particular universe rather than in one with, say, no gravity or only two dimensions, or a Bizarro world in which Glenn Beck is a left-wing rather than right-wing nut? To answer this question, Hawking invokes the anthropic principle, a phrase coined by physicist Brandon Carter in the 1970s....The weak anthropic principle, or WAP, holds merely that any cosmic observer will observe conditions, at least locally, that make the observer's existence possible. The strong version, SAP, says that the universe must be constructed so as to make observers possible.
The anthropic principle has always struck me as so dumb that I can't understand why anyone takes it seriously. It's cosmology's version of creationism. WAP is tautological and SAP is teleological. The physicist Tony Rothman, with whom I worked at Scientific American in the 1990s, liked to say that the anthropic principle in any form is completely ridiculous and hence should be called CRAP.

And yet. Among the things that will not finally suffice, a critique of readership ideologies takes its place as well. Surely another reason that people feel betrayed and ripped off by the demolishing of authorial integrity in both cases is exactly because the authority of that position was so necessary for the books. That is to say, neither Frey nor Leroy can lay legitimate claim to a text-based understanding because neither could produce texts that suffer such engagement. To put it bluntly — and here's what the hand-wringing responses shy away from, even as they claim to have smelled a rat all along — readers are led to a need for the author's truth-value because that's about all that's on offer: the only folks with a right to I-told-you-so are those who noted all along that both Frey and Leroy are terrible prose writers; neither could build a truth out of text no matter what had or had not befallen them otherwise.

overview of current (post-psychoanalytical) theories of the survival advantages of dreaming

[Play is anticipatory learning, encouraging] rapid, flexible responses to...critical situations. As humans grew more social and cooperative...interpersonal understanding became increasingly important[;] representations of events that had not, or not yet, occurred[—fictions—provided] cognitive enhancement, social learning, and community cohesion....
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[When hominids began walking upright, our anatomy was transformed: The pelvis, and birth canals, narrowed, even as brain size grew. The evolutionary solution: Humans were born less developed than other primates...Helpless] infants could not cling to foraging mothers, who had to put them down, which terrified them. The solution: motherese, or baby talk, which became language....
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[C]ooked food is more chemically efficient. [Evolutionary] results: "smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies, and reduced body hair; more running; more hunting; longer lives; calmer temperaments; and a new emphasis on bonding between males and females."