STATESVILLE, NC (WBTV) - A man who was with about a dozen people who were looking for a legendary “ghost train” in Iredell County was hit by a locomotive and killed early Friday morning. 

There’s a lesson in here somewhere…

This new study seems to validate the role of cell phone radiation as a contributing factor in declining bee populations.

Andrew Goldsworthy, a biologist from the UK’s Imperial College, London, has studied the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. He thinks it’s possible bees could be affected by cell phone radiation.

The reason, Goldsworthy says, could hinge on a pigment in bees called cryptochrome.

“Animals, including insects, use cryptochrome for navigation,” Goldsworthy told CNN.

“They use it to sense the direction of the earth’s magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from [cell] phones and their base stations. So basically bees do not find their way back to the hive.”

The cell was created by stitching together the genome of a goat pathogen called Mycoplasma mycoides from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab, and inserting the genome into the empty cytoplasm of a related bacterium. The transplanted genome booted up in its host cell, and then divided over and over to make billions of M. mycoides cells.

Venter and his team have previously accomplished both feats – creating a synthetic genome and transplanting a genome from one bacterium into another – but this time they have combined the two.

Exciting as long as it’s contained. ETC Group gives the counterpoint.

At last, an algorithm that recognizes sarcasm (pdf file), making certain emoticons obsolete.

I like the take on this over at Bayblab: “Next Up: An Irony Meter.”

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.

Story here.

Sounds a lot like Fred Hoyle here:

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Nice work if you can get it. Hoyle could never get any recognition for similar ideas, but coming from Hawking of course they are oh so respectable.

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?

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.

An exploration of the late Robert Anton Wilson’s work.

The flavor-

A Non Euclidean Rumination On Subliminal Rationalists and Recalling Robert Anton Wilson

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

“Positivists decline to acknowledge any a priori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience. … They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is”
-Kurt Godel

Kudos to The Anomalist.

The earthquake was followed by a boom in UFO sightings, but sixteen cases occurred on the night of the tragedy alone (some of them accompanied by significant visual material) which have been subjected to study by UFO researchers.

This would seem to lend more credence to the tectonic strain theory of UFOs and the paranormal.

The gaps in neuroscience’s understanding of the psychopath are filling in:

“There has been a long tra­di­tion of re­search on psy­chop­a­thy that has fo­cused on the lack of sen­si­ti­vity to pun­ish­ment and a lack of fear, but those traits are not par­tic­u­larly good pre­dic­tors of vi­o­lence or crim­i­nal be­hav­ior,” said Van­der­bilt psy­chol­o­gist Da­vid Zald, co-au­thor of the stu­dy. “Our da­ta is sug­gest­ing that some­thing might be hap­pen­ing on the oth­er side of things. These in­di­vid­u­als ap­pear to have such a strong draw to re­ward—to the car­rot—that it over­whelms the sense of risk or con­cern about the stick.”

But get THIS. For the study, they found people with high levels of psychopathic traits - and gave SPEED TO THEM:

The re­search­ers gave the vol­un­teers a dose of am­phet­a­mine, or speed, and then scanned their brains us­ing PET to view dopamine re­lease in re­sponse to the stim­u­lant.…“Our hy­poth­e­sis was that psy­cho­pathic traits are al­so linked to dys­func­tion in dopamine re­ward cir­cuit­ry,” Buck­holtz said. “Con­sis­tent with what we thought, we found peo­ple with high lev­els of psy­cho­pathic traits had al­most four times the amount of dopamine re­leased in re­sponse to am­phet­a­mine.”

…“It may be that be­cause of these ex­ag­ger­at­ed dopamine re­sponses, once they fo­cus on the chance to get a re­ward, psy­chopaths are un­able to al­ter their at­ten­tion un­til they get what they’re af­ter,” Buck­holtz said.

 Namely, speed.

Apparently most of Canada was holding it during the gold medal hockey game. Water consumption spiked wildly between the game’s periods, as much of the city ran to the bathroom…

Thrill to the graph which accompanies this story.

By offering a panoramic view of how substances behave in the real world, the theory gives scientists a tool for developing materials that can be used for designing new technologies. Car frames made from lighter, strong metal alloys, for instance, might make vehicles more energy efficient, and smaller, faster electronic devices might be produced using nanowires with diameters tens of thousands of times smaller than that of a human hair.

And

The researchers hope that by moving beyond the concepts introduced by Thomas and Fermi more than 80 years ago, their work will speed future innovations. “Before people could only look at small bits of materials and perfect crystals,” Carter said. “Now we can accurately apply quantum mechanics at scales of matter never possible before.

It’s Miller Time.

Robert Anton Wilson riffs on accelerating weirdness.

He’ll be amazed to read this science article that attributes the creation of the “holographic universe” theory to these dudes in 1990s. That’s funny to me because Bohm published a vigorous scientific case for the holographic universe, the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980.

Basically, the 1990s dudes published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, as an offshoot of well-accepted black hole work. So they get official credit. Meanwhile, although Bohm was a giant among quantum mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order was a “popular” book and so doesn’t count, if you can call a book with tons of equations in it “popular.”
Seems like you would give the guy a mention is all.

Happens a lot where the heretical theories become accepted just a few years later, with the heretic not allowed a shred of acknowledgment - certainly not from the scientific press, who really are just mouthpieces for the establishment.

When Bohm said it, it was heretical and involved some “challenges to prevailing views”. Now that we know he was right about the whole holographic universe thing, maybe those challenges should get a second look too.

Must read.

Facebook page for our fiction project, “Novelty Theater”:

 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Novelty-Theater-by-Allen-and-Jim-Richardson/264250088092

Become a fan if you … are one. Warning: adult situations.

interactive musical shopping cart/projector

(from Wooster)

Who wouldn’t sign up to chow down on forbidden synthetic human meat out of a futuristic food tube?

…in fruit flies that is: (oops link broke)

after mating, females still slept deeply at night, but ditched the usual siesta in favour of extra foraging and searching for places to lay her eggs,” he says. “This behaviour lasts for around eight days – and our research findings suggest that this change is not by choice.

And so the fruit fly is confirmed to be a prisoner of its own biology, like everybody. Article also contains this gem:

Fruit flies are a good model for looking at sleep behaviour in humans as they exhibit many of the hallmarks of mammalian sleep. For example they sleep deeply at night from which they’re difficult to rouse and they have a preferred sleeping posture. If kept awake through the night, they exhibit tiredness the next day; if fed caffeine, they stay awake, and they become drowsy if given antihistamines.

I find it difficult to avoid anthropomorphising here.

Anyway, aggregating weird science stories like this is the kind of thing that’s made us the #1 animal sex facts site on the web.

As if Klingon wasn’t enough.

Latest extreme animal sex fact for you perverts, about Dawson’s bees (via the BBC):

As a female emerges, the male bees turn on one another, competing intensely to get access to her.

Bundles of male bees form, with each trying to bite and sting another to death.

The result is mass murder, with whole generations of male bees wiping each other out to mate with females.

Click through for video.

A list of all our animal sex posts (including this one) here.

From the Pdf document: