Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
Stephan: This is the latest in the presentiment trend in which science is discovering that our bodies anticipate below our level of normal conscious awareness, coming events. This translates down to the cellular level (search the SR archives on 'quantum biology').
Wouldn’t it be amazing if our bodies prepared us for future events that could be very important to us, even if there’s no clue about what those events will be?
Presentiment without any external clues may, in fact, exist, according to new Northwestern University research that analyzes the results of 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010.
Researchers already know that our subconscious minds sometimes know more than our conscious minds. Physiological measures of subconscious arousal, for instance, tend to show up before conscious awareness that a deck of cards is stacked against us.
‘What hasn’t been clear is whether humans have the ability to predict future important events even without any clues as to what might happen,’ said Julia Mossbridge, lead author of the study and research associate in the Visual Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern.
A person playing a video game at work while wearing headphones, for example, can’t hear when his or her boss is coming around the corner.
‘But our analysis suggests that if you were tuned into your body, you might be able to detect these anticipatory changes between two and 10 seconds beforehand and close your video game,’ Mossbridge said. ‘You might even have a chance to […]
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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
, - The Raw Story/The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It is obvious from the demise of the print issue of weekly magazines such as Newsweek, or the paper edition of prestigious daily publications like The Christian Science Monitor that the impact of the internet has profoundly changed the way publications operate. Now we are beginning to see this effect reflected in scientific publishing.
Read all about it: academic publishing is changing faster than anyone has realised, according to a new study reported today in BMC Medicine.
Before 2000 the vast majority of research papers were published in journals that could only be read by academics if they - or their university libraries - paid a subscription. But since the turn of the millennium, the growth of the world wide web has been accompanied by the emergence of open access publishing, by which research papers are made freely available online. According to results published today by Laasko and Björk, over half of all research papers may now be available through open access.
The academic publishing game has changed irrevocably.
The change does not mean that academics have embraced the free-for-all file-sharing mentality that is the bug-bear of the music business. Rather it reflects the deep-seated amateur ethos of scholars, who have always seen the work of producing and reviewing their research findings as an intrinsic part of the job.
While the dissemination of that research relied on the printing and distribution of academic journals, the publishers’ subscription model was a sensible way to manage this business. But the opportunities provided by the web for instant distribution has fused […]
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Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012
ANDREW HOUGH, - The Telegraph (U.K.)
Stephan: This is potentially significant good news. However, this report does not answer what it seems to me is a critical question. How much energy does it take to produce this fuel compared to the energy it produces?
A small company in the north of England has developed the ‘air capture
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Monday, October 22nd, 2012
MICHAEL WARREN, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: It is a measure of the waning influence of the U.S. that other countries have had it with our War on Drugs, and our Rightist social values, and are going their own way, trying other approaches to drugs and abortion.
Everyone knows about Holland but, surprisingly, few seem to know Portugal's drug laws were changed in 2000 and went into effect in July 2001. The new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. However, the offense was changed from a criminal one to an administrative procedure so long as the amount possessed was no more than ten days' supply of that substance. Functionally Marijuana usage is ignored.
What happened? In 1999, Portugal had the highest rate of HIV amongst injecting drug users in the European Union. Since the new laws have been in place the rate has decreased.
According to a study done by the conservative Cato Institute, 'Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success.' Glenn Greenwald, who conducted the research said, 'It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.'
Now we have Uruguay.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay – Uruguayans used to call their country the Switzerland of Latin America, but its faded grey capital seems a bit more like Amsterdam now that its congress has legalized abortion and is drawing up plans to sell government-grown marijuana.
Both measures would be unthinkable in many other countries. Cuba is the only other nation in the region that makes first-trimester abortions accessible to all women, and no country in the world produces and sells pot for drug users to enjoy.
But President Jose ‘Pepe’ Mujica, a flower-farming former leftist guerrilla, vowed to sign whatever bill congress could settle on that can minimize the 30,000 illegal abortions his government says Uruguayan women suffer annually.
And while lawmakers have yet to debate pot sales, Mujica’s ruling Broad Front coalition staked its ground in August by openly declaring that the drug war has failed. Smoking pot – if not growing and selling it – is already legal in Uruguay, and supplying the weed is a $30 million business, the government said.
This is democracy ‘a la Uruguaya’ – the Uruguayan way – a phrase that reflects both the pride and the unmet promises of a society where finding common ground is a highly shared value, […]
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Monday, October 22nd, 2012
Stephan: This is the latest and, by now, I think, close to definitive report on the collapse of the bees -- colony collapse disorder. It is, as many have been saying for some time, the pesticides. It will now be very revealing to see whether the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us -- and the bees -- do their job, or whether the corruption has reached such a level that corporate profit trumps everything else.
If that is how it turns out, the food crisis will take on a dimension that is hard to imagine.
Chronic exposure to pesticides has a bigger knock-on effect on bees than conventional probes suggest, according to a new study on Sunday touching on the mysterious collapse of bee colonies.
Biologists at the University of London carried out an exceptional field study into bumblebees exposed to two commonly used agricultural insecticides. They sought to mimic what happens in a real-life setting, where different crops are sprayed with different pesticides at different dosages and times.
Because bees get their food both from sprayed crops and wild plants, such variations make it hard to calculate the insects’ total exposure to the chemicals. In addition, very little is known about what happens to bees once they return to the colony after foraging, possibly passing on pesticide-laden food to larvae. A team led by Richard Gill monitored 40 bumblebee colonies, tagging 259 bees with radio frequency identification (RFID) to time exactly when the insects left home or returned. The colonies were divided into four groups. Three were allowed to access feeder boxes, set up in the path of their nest boxes, that had a sugary syrup spiked with imidacloprid insecticide and/or a filter paper laced with another agricultural chemical, gamma-cyhalothrin.
The bumblebees were not […]
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