The flip of a switch could become all it takes to get a good night’s sleep, according to a study released Monday. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found a way to stimulate the slow waves typical of deep sleep by sending a harmless magnetic signal through the skulls of sleeping volunteers. Sleep remains one of the big mysteries in biology. All animals sleep, and people who are deprived of sleep suffer physically, emotionally and intellectually. But nobody knows how sleep restores the brain. Now, Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, has discovered how to stimulate brain waves that characterize the deepest stage of sleep. The discovery could open a new window into the role of sleep in keeping humans healthy, happy and able to learn. The study was published in the April 30 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The brain function in question, called slow wave activity, is critical to the restoration of mood and the ability to learn, think and remember, Tononi says. During slow wave activity, which occupies about 80 percent of sleeping hours, waves of […]
ISTANBUL — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Wednesday for early parliamentary elections in Turkey, offering a plebiscite on his ruling party’s brand of populist, religiously rooted politics, which the country’s secular elite regards as an entry for political Islam. Erdogan’s call to move elections to June 24 from Nov. 4 capped a tumultuous week in which his choice for president was approved by a parliament Erdogan’s party dominates, only then to be annulled Tuesday by Turkey’s highest court, a bastion of the secular establishment. Hundreds of thousands turned out for a protest in Istanbul, fearful that Erdogan’s choice would represent a rollback for liberal individual freedoms, and the military, calling itself ‘the absolute defender of secularism,’ bluntly threatened to intervene. Erdogan told a televised gathering of his party Wednesday that the court decision was ‘a bullet aimed at democracy.’ ‘The parliamentary democratic system has now been blocked,’ the prime minister added. ‘To get rid of this blockade and lift the rule of the minority over the majority, the only door to go to is the nation.’ Officials of the ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym AKP, cast Erdogan’s decision as a […]
Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn’t lost blood. All that’s happened is his heart has stopped beating-the definition of ‘clinical death’-and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died? As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller ‘How We Die,’ the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn’t be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. ‘After one hour,’ he says, ‘we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.’ In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. But if the […]
Tony Blair has indicated that Gordon Brown is likely to replace him as Prime Minister within a matter of weeks. Tony Blair addresses Labour Party workers at their headquarters in London Tony Blair marked his 10th anniversary in office by promising to reveal his resignation plans next week ‘Within the next few weeks I won’t be Prime Minister of this country. In all probability, a Scot will become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,’ Mr Blair told party supporters at a Labour rally in Edinburgh. His comments come on the day Mr Blair celebrates his 10th anniversary in office. Earlier, Mr Blair marked the occasion by promising a ‘definitive’ statement to the British people next week on when he plans to leave Number 10. With the party braced for a disastrous night at the polls on Thursday, Mr Blair is seeking to prevent disillusionment over his own premiership from overshadowing the arrival of his successor. There has been growing speculation Mr Blair will announce his resignation next week and then stand down towards the end of next month, with June 30 emerging as the favourite date. Speaking on GMTV this morning, Mr […]
TIJUANA, Mexico — What do Tijuana, Baghdad and Jerusalem have in common? They all have walls that divide neighbors, cause controversy and form part of an array of physical barriers around the world that dwarf the late, unlamented Iron Curtain. There are walls, fences, trenches and berms. Some are reinforced by motion detectors, heat-sensing cameras, X-ray systems, night-vision equipment, helicopters, drones and blimps. Some are still under construction, some in the planning stage. When completed, the barriers will run thousands of miles, in places as far apart as Mexico and India, Afghanistan and Spain, Morocco and Thailand, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. They are meant to keep job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers out, thwart invaders, and keep antagonists apart. Their proponents cite the proverb ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ but critics say they are a paradoxical result of globalization in so far as goods and capital can move freely but migrants cannot. By an irony of history, the United States — the country that hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — has emerged as a champion wall builder. The latest wall to divide city neighborhoods went up in Baghdad in […]
Schwartzreport Podcast
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
