An in-depth examination of the possible selection pressures to account for psychopathology.

Dr Ben Carter, from the University of Liverpool, presented his research on dry water at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.

He said: ‘’There’s nothing else quite like it. Hopefully, we may see dry water making waves in the future.'’

Dr. Carter, you crack me up. This story reminds me of the line by comedian Stephen Wright-”I bought some powdered water, but I didn’t know what to add.”

The sowing season may be just around the corner, but this year German farmers will not be planting genetically modified crops: German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner announced Tuesday she was banning the cultivation of GM corn in Germany. Under the new regulations, the cultivation of MON 810, a GM corn produced by the American biotech giant Monsanto, will be prohibited in Germany, as will the sale of its seed. Aigner told reporters Tuesday she had legitimate reasons to believe that MON 810 posed “a danger to the environment,” a position which she said the Environment Ministry also supported. In taking the step, Aigner is taking advantage of a clause in EU law which allows individual countries to impose such bans.

Righteous.

God I love Wikipedia.

A couple/few months ago, I called Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office and said she should be more like Al Franken. By that I meant, among other things, do more visible pushback against the right, and freaking tear it up a little. The nice man I spoke to there assured me it was all about the fact that Sen. Franken was in fact a celebrity before joining the Senate, and that Sen. Klobuchar was working on other important, but less sexy, stuff. That was all good with me; I just wanted to apply a little pressure in that direction, because I think it’s valuable. Well she finally delivered, and went on a fatal rampage against some GOP idiot in the Kagan hearings who was on about how we were “more free” in 1980 or some shit. Thank you, Senator Klobuchar, for sticking it to that weasel.

Legalize it

450 pages of sheer blasphemy, the only thing left to do is find a brave publisher.

No Pants No Peace, originally uploaded by jessicahayssen.

My 12-year old has fantasized about being a protester, and reasoned that if she’s going to protest something, it should be something she feels strongly about, which these days is that too many joggers wear their shorts too tight. Prompted by a political sign in the yard supporting a nurses’ union, she turned a flattened “priority mail” box into her protest sign, prominently featuring the text “NO PANTS NO PEACE” and a little picture of some pants. The opposite side reads “TO (sic) MANY TIGHT SHORTS” and has a picture of a shorts-clad stick-man jogger inside the classic crossed-out circle. She affixed the sign to a stick and planted it in the yard last weekend. So look out world - she wants to be a “whale warrior” when she grows up.

Analysis here. We’ve been saying this since at least 1998, so our patience with reductionism/mechanism is wearing thin.

Michelangelo, guerilla anatomist:

It is reported that Michelangelo concealed an image of the brain in the first of these last 4 panels, namely, the Creation of Adam. Here we present evidence that he concealed another neuronanatomic structure in the final panel of this series, the Separation of Light From Darkness, specifically a ventral view of the brainstem.

Is there a new type of supernova or not? In this corner:

Dr Hagai Perets, who led the study, began his examination of the strange supernova whilst working at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

He is now based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, US, and said: “It was clear that we were seeing a new type of supernova.”

And in this corner:

But another research team, led by Professor Koji Kawabata from Hiroshima University in Japan examined a supernova called SN 2005cz, which had very similar properties.

Professor Kawabata and his team argued that this event was in fact a collapsing giant.

“These properties are best explained by a core-collapse supernova at the low-mass end of the range of massive stars that explode,” he and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

They say that this star represents a boundary between stars that end their lives with a gigantic supernova explosion and those that do not explode.

“Our study has rescued the standard theory of stellar evolution,” said Professor Kawabata.

A statement of dubious value.

Now available here as a Google Doc.

And when you’re done reading it you can have a nice hot cup of this:

A close shave on the Deepwater Horizon.

Mysterious floating blobs of light known as ball lightning might simply be hallucinations caused by overstimulated brains, a new study suggests.

For hundreds of years eyewitnesses have reported brief encounters with the golf ball- to tennis ball-size orbs of electricity. But scientists have been unable to agree on how and why ball lightning forms, since the phenomenon is rare and very short-lived. (See “Ball Lightning: A Shocking Scientific Mystery.”)

Ball lightning is often reported during thunderstorms, and it’s known that multiple consecutive lightning strikes can create strong magnetic fields. So Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria wondered whether ball lightning is really a hallucination induced by magnetic stimulation of the brain’s visual cortex or the eye’s retina.

Hallucinations caused by lightning-induced magnetic fields? This whole phenomenon just got weirder.

Kind of a niche market for these, but if you dig on heretical astronomer Tom Van Flandern, then you’re going to want to look into these fine items from the Gonzo Science Gift Emporium.

Basically, to suggest that Tom Van Flandern is right is to question the Big Bang, and/or to question the nature of gravity, and/or to support an “exploded planet” origin of the asteroid belt and comets. So, just send a case of these to your local observatory, and then sit back and watch the paradigms collapse. Mwah ha ha ha ha!

These brief animations just got sent to me, after I found original Gonzo Science contributor Chris Larsen on Facebook after several lifetimes. Anyway Chris might be mortified that I’m just posting these here without asking - they are several years old - but I really think they’re imaginative and fun on the sci-fi tip. Back in the day, the very first Gonzo Science publication was an ensemble ‘zine I put together in Santa Cruz, CA. circa 1996. Chris is O.G. because he contributed an article about anomalous archaeology. We also published a handful of handmade comic books, and he is the artist on our collaborative comix story “I Shot JFK”. Anyway, he’s been in school for programming so look out.

http://ubiknik.com/swf/kite.html

http://ubiknik.com/swf/machinist.html 

Here is our new “Gonzo Science Recommends” page at Amazon, where you can essentially browse the virtual contents of the Gonzo Science library, and if you find you want to buy one of these anomalous tomes, we get a small finder’s fee. Keep checking back as we fill out the ranks with heretical tome after heretical tome. Thank you.

Follow all the breaking catastrophes of the day on TPM’s new Catastrophe Wire.

Had to post this as a student of action-figure videos (a few Gonzo Science productions may be found on this page).

This is a.) hilarious b.) NSFW so much.

If it’s true that this was made by these pre-adolescent girls, as it appears, then I just gotta say, the little film sets they made are pretty ingenious.

Saw this linked on kos: endurance athelete needs to go crazy in order to win.

Yet Robic does not excel on physical talent alone. He is not always the fastest competitor (he often makes up ground by sleeping 90 minutes or less a day), nor does he possess any towering physiological gift. On rare occasions when he permits himself to be tested in a laboratory, his ability to produce power and transport oxygen ranks on a par with those of many other ultra-endurance athletes. He wins for the most fundamental of reasons: he refuses to stop.

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

As linked to in this grab-bag post at the great orange satan Daily Kos, this is a strongly worded plea from an athiest for everyone to just get off his back. Money quote:

You know what would be really great? If all the fantastic (and they are fantastic) liberal/left Christians would spend five minutes a day writing angry letters to the Christian right wing about how unchristian they are instead of complaining to atheists about how much bad press you all are getting from the overt bad actions of your co-religionists.

Ouch! This Catholic Church implosion has started to singe even athiests standing too close to it.

And this amazing piece of citizen journalism, “Anatomy of a thrilling GOP disaster“, is just political writing at its most fun to read. Money quote (last lines of piece):

This was a complete GOP disaster. It was a thrill to be part of it.

In true Gonzo style.

This quote from media analyst blog Atrios’ Eschaton is a good one:

…we live in the accountability-free era, where nobody could have predicted except those who did and were right for the wrong reasons. Those who didn’t were wrong for the right reasons and are therefore still Very Serious People in good standing.

It is intended as a sarcastic comment about how the cheerleaders of the Iraq War and the financial crisis still have jobs in many cases, and in many other cases they have actually failed upward - while those who predicted the crisis somehow still remain outsiders.

That’s how politics in science works too. For instance, Fred Hoyle’s ideas are being appropriated under different guises, while his name is still mud. He was right for the wrong reasons, but once his stuff is rebranded, it can safely be used by establishment figures who were wrong for the right reasons. And so it goes.

Some water and a spinning table was basically all that was employed to start cracking this mystery.

Still doesn’t explain why it doesn’t occur on more planets, or even Saturn’s own south pole.

They sampled 27 exoplanets that transit their home stars from our perspective and found that 6 of the 27 orbited in a retrograde motion, opposite to its parent stars rotational direction. That’s 22% of the sampled stars. Will be interesting when they can determine stars orbit by other means other than transits.

“This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets,” said Geneva Observatory astronomer Amaury Triaud…

Ya, I’d say so. More so, though, a bomb-dropping in the field of planetary formation as well.

Around these parts, we are used to disagreeing with that mechanist reductionist dog Richard Dawkins. Liked him a little better as bulldog-athiest-with-a-camera-crew, but it’s still easy to dislike him on style. But whereas I’m sure the Pope won’t be arrested, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say right on dude.

The article is technically correct, but kind of misleading and reductionist in its message, which is what I have become all too used to in mainstream reporting.

“We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon-dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not,” said team member Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, of the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

So they basically proved that NDE’s are linked to the brain thinking it is….near death. Bravo, guys. According to the authors of the article, they studied patients undergoing cardiac arrest. A good place to look for low CO2 levels. But as there is this hiccup in the work:

Still, not all scientists are convinced: “The one difficulty in arguing that CO2 is the cause is that in cardiac arrests, everybody has high CO2 but only 10 percent have NDEs,” said neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

What’s more, in heart attack patients, Fenwick said, “there is no coherent cerebral activity which could support consciousness, let alone an experience with the clarity of an NDE.”

So it has been shown that some people have these experiences, and doesn’t even broach the subject of the mechanism in the brain that causes such lucid and powerful experiences.How about a follow up article on Peter Fenwick or Rick Strassman’s research? Maybe a bit too gonzo for National Geographic…..

Suggested starting point for keep-you-up-all-night reading on NDE’s. More.

Anybody’s guess on what causes this eclipse: Exploded planet? Empire’s Battlecruiser? Probably not that exciting, but cool nonetheless.

Whatever it is, it’s big. Here’s the wiki page to the star, Epsilon Aurigae.

the therapeutically active components in marijuana - the cannabinoids - appear to be remarkably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs. This notable lack of toxicity is arguably because cannabinoids mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce - so-called endocannabinoids - that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis.

In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions.

Just how important is this system in maintaining our health? Here’s a clue: In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Armed with these findings, a handful of scientists have speculated that the root cause of certain disease conditions - including migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other functional conditions alleviated by clinical cannabis - may be an underlying endocannabinoid deficiency.

Now THAT’S scientific heresy! Whoo!

Courtesy of The Transistor

Holy crap. And that’s using Big Bang assumptions. Essentially an admission that when it comes to astronomy, everything is up for grabs.

The astronomers carried out two sets of observations in the same region, hunting for light emitted by galaxies born 10 billion years ago.

[Translation for non-Big Bangers: They were hunting for high-redshift objects.]

The first looked for so-called Lyman-alpha light, the classic telltale used to compile cosmic maps, named after its U.S. discoverer, Theodore Lyman. Lyman-alpha is energy released by excited hydrogen atoms.

The second observation used a special camera called HAWK-1 to look for a signature emitted at a different wavelength, also by glowing hydrogen, which is known as the hydrogen-alpha (or H-alpha) line.

The second sweep yielded a whole bagful of light sources that had not been spotted using the Lyman-alpha technique.

They include some of the faintest galaxies ever found, forged at a time when the universe was just a child.

[Translation for non-Big Bangers: they found a bunch of low luminosity, high-redshift objects this way, which rogue astronomers Arp et al. would say is just what they’d heretically expect of matter newly created/ejected from active galactic nuclei (”Moreover, the closest and therefore most recent ejections have the highest relative redshifts, and the lowest intrinsic luminosities.”) , essentially the opposite of the mainstream’s interpretation of the great Rorschach Test in the sky. Based on this and Arp’s observational evidence, we would expect many of these “background” galaxies the mainstream just found to actually be objects ejected from foreground galaxies, but with higher redshifts and so assumed by the mainstream to be background. They will in general tend to be just a few arcseconds away from the foreground galaxies, which will also be criss-crossed with ejection lines of quasars. That’s the smell of pure heresy people.]

The astronomers conclude that Lyman-alpha surveys may only spot just a tiny number of the total light emitted from far galaxies. Astonishingly, as many as 90 percent of such distant galaxies may go unseen in these exercises.

“If there are 10 galaxies seen, there could be a hundred there,” said Hayes.

And we’re supposed to trust them on dark matter?

(Thanks to princelumber for sending along the link.)