Stephan: Finally even materialist committed neuroscientists, as this report points out, are confronting the idea that consciousness is more than the brain. Their own experimental data are forcing the Ghost in the Machine into the open.
Jonathon Keats is an artist and writer. His collection of fables, 'The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six,' was published this year.
Reading the news, you might be excused for thinking that scientists are on the verge of understanding the human brain.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health are diligently mapping all 100 trillion neural connections between our 86 billion neurons, and President Obama has just announced a $100 million Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative that will study all those networks in action.
The neurologist Robert Burton is skeptical, to say the least. His new book, ‘A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind,
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TSUYOSHI INAJIMA, - Bloomberg
Stephan: In addition to everything else Fukushima has shown us the unintended consequence of radioactive tuna. This technology is fine, until it's not fine. Then it's a problem for we know not how many years, and creates horrible social problems.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said thousands of gallons of highly radioactive water has leaked from an underground pool at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant and may have seeped into the soil.
Tepco estimates about 120 tons (32,280 gallons) of radioactive water has escaped, company spokesman Daisuke Hirose said, adding it was uncertain how much contaminated water has soaked into the soil. While he said the utility plans to complete pumping the remaining water to other underground pools by April 9, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority today said ‘a small quantity
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Stephan: This is the first of two stories. I am running them both today, because I want to make the point that in nuclear accidents there is a question as to whether they are ever really 'over;' this is the thing that is different about nuclear power. Tar sands oil leaks, such as the one in Arkansas, eventually get cleaned up. Nuclear waste is forever.
US residents near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation may be in grave danger: a nuclear safety board found that the underground tanks holding toxic, radioactive waste could explode at any minute, due to a dangerous buildup of hydrogen gas.
After Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DFNSB) about the risks posed by the nuclear site, board members relayed their concerns about the potential for hydrogen gas buildup within the walls of a tank – particularly those with double walls.
‘All the double-shell tanks contain waste that continuously generates some flammable gas,’ the board said in a letter received by Wyden on Monday. ‘This gas will eventually reach flammable conditions if adequate ventilation is not provided.’
The safety board had previously issued a warning about their concerns, which have not yet been addressed. In September, the board sent a letter to the Department of Energy, claiming that there were no adequate safeguards to protect against the buildup of flammable gasses inside Hanford’s waste storage tanks. The letter, which outlines the concerns shared with Sen. Wyden on Monday, was declassified on Tuesday.
If the tanks were to explode, there would be flammable releases that would ‘have considerable radiological consequences, endanger personnel, contaminate […]
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PHILIP BETHGE, - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: This is a potentially huge development in medicine, because it bypasses the Theocratic Right's objections to stem cell research. This is a line of research that will ultimately be a bigger deal than the discovery of antibiotics, which is to say what we now think of as modern medicine.
Ethical worries have slowed medical research into applications for stem cells. But scientists like Robert Lanza have developed less controversial ways to derive stem cells from normal body cells rather than embryos and are already launching the first clinical trials.
Stem cell researcher Robert Lanza hopes to save thousands of lives — and for a long time this caused him to fear for his own.
‘They bused these crazy people up from Kansas, and then they picnicked right outside our front door,’ he says as he gazes out of his window at the gray winter landscape of Marlborough, Massachusetts. ‘The public thought we had these little buggy-eyed embryos here and were ripping apart their limbs to get these cells.’
The physician always feared ‘somebody hiding in the bushes,’ waiting to attack him. At the time, a doctor was threatened at a nearby fertility clinic, and a pipe bomb exploded at a bio lab in Boston.
‘Back then I thought that there was probably a 50-50 chance that I was going to get knocked off because I was so visible,’ says the doctor. Then he leans back in his chair and laughs. Lanza likes to flirt with danger: ‘I said, okay, try to kill me […]
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, - Agence France-Presse (France)/The Raw Story
Stephan: There is still so very, very much we do not know about our past.
Over four millennia ago, the fortress town of Gonur-Tepe might have been a rare advanced civilisation before it was buried for centuries under the dust of the Kara Kum desert in remote western Turkmenistan.
After being uncovered by Soviet archaeologists in the last century, Gonur-Tepe, once home to thousands of people and the centre of a thriving region, is gradually revealing its mysteries with new artifacts being uncovered on every summer dig.
The scale of the huge complex which spans some 30 hectares can only be properly appreciated from the air, from where the former buildings look like a maze in the desert surrounded by vast walls.
Just 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the celebrated ancient city of Merv outside the modern city of Mary, the ruins of Gonur-Tepe are an indication of the archeological riches of Turkmenistan, one of the most isolated countries in the world.
Around 2,000 BC, Gonur-Tepe was the main settlement of the Margush or Margiana region that was home to one of the most sophisticated, but little-known Bronze Age civilisations.
The site - which until the last century was covered by desert and scrub - was uncovered in Soviet times by the celebrated archeologist Viktor Sarianidi who, at the age […]
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