Category: interesting

North Korean Navy preparing for war.  🙂
Some say without China, they cannot dare.

Normal human ageing could be slowed by protecting chromosome tips.

“This may be one of several things you need to do in order to extend lifespan and extend healthy living.”

Ample telemorase doesn’t just prevent ageing. It can reverse it.

Chromosomes have caps called telomeres at their ends. As cells divide, telomeres shorten, eventually cells stop dividing and die.

Telomerase prevents this decline in some kinds of cells.

A spray solution of a patient’s own stem cells is healing their severe burns.

University of Utah pilot project showing remarkable results.

“We can only imagine a day when sheets of pristine skin might be available to any patient off the shelf.” —Dr. Amalia Cochran, U of Utah Burn Care Center.

The definition of mental illness is changing.

Consider schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia may ‘capture’ up to 11% of our population. Oops.

And there’s ample evidence that hallucinations, delusions, reality distortions, unusual magical beliefs and psychosis-like experiences are present in everyone.

“So What Is Mental Illness?”

In essence, there is nothing truly ‘mental’ about a mental disorder.

1) It’s a behavior or pattern occurring in an individual, causing clinically significant distress or impairment, reflecting an underlying physical dysfunction, and is not primarily the result of social deviance or conflicts with society.

2) It’s also not just a response to a stressful event like a friend or family member’s death, where it’s normal to expect someone to appear “depressed” or otherwise disturbed for a period of time.

3) A mental disorder is an underlying psychobiological dysfunction—a physical problems in the brain.

BigThink wonders, “Hmm. If we adjusted nations according to their population….”
[click pic for larger]

Well, for the comfort of us, er, cattle, who else would you ask?

How Animal Behavior Scientist Temple Grandin Would Fix Airport Security

200 billion neurons linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses.

A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth,” he said.

“In a human, there are more than 125 trillion synapses just in the cerebral cortex alone,” said Smith.

That’s roughly equal to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

Haitian protest is starkly aimed:

“Those soldiers are tourists! The money that’s invested in MINUSTAH – they could invest that money in education. They could invest in constructing hospitals, in cleaning up the country. but they’re paying those soldiers instead.”

The United Nations Stabilization Mission In Haiti (Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti), also known as MINUSTAH, an acronym of the French translation, is a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti that has been in operation since 2004. …en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINUSTAH

They are the rarest of the rarest of the rare.

There is evidence that they can see through each other’s eyes and perhaps share each other’s unspoken thoughts. And if that proves true, it will be the rarest thing of all. They will be unique in the world.

The way their heads are joined, they have markedly different fields of view. One child will look at a toy or a cup. The other can reach across and grab it, even though her own eyes couldn’t possibly see its location.

“They share thoughts, too.”

h/t Mind Hacks

What’s important here?

A new right angle plug that lets cords lie flush with the wall. Something never seen before.

I’ll never shake the surprise the obvious isn’t already invented.

From the diligent scourings of Humorzo, here’s an entirely new shake on byte my feed, but please, let’s tend to this story now.

An only child, a lonely boy, over-assertive, absolutely sure that he had big things coming.

On a raw December ­afternoon…

On the table lay…

The midwife wiped the poor girl’s brow…

Macrophallus is the medical term, and Frank was proud of his ­extraordinary endowment.

In his mind he was a ­personage !

Roger Ebert:

So now I move on to a larger view of Hugh Hefner.

Hefner and Playboy have been around so long that not everyone remembers what America used to be like.

The fact is that sex made money for Hefner, and he used it to produce one of the best magazines in America.

He also spent money to free a man who faced a 50-year prison term for…fellatio.

Hefner’s Playboy Foundation fought for civil liberties in general. The cost for these activities came out of his profits, and that didn’t give him a moment’s pause.

In “Happiness the World Over” [abstract], countries enjoy individual and economic freedom, higher life expectancy, lower rates of infant mortality and greater wealth.

There were no significant happiness based on marriage rates, divorce rates, fertility rates, literacy rates, suicide rates and penal incarceration rates.

The 20 happiest nations are:

1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada
11. Ireland
12. Luxembourg
13. Costa Rica
14. Malta
15. The Netherlands
16. Antigua and Barbuda
17. Malaysia
18. New Zealand
19. Norway
20. The Seychelles

23. USA

Summary of recent happiness research, BUT he observed that the amount of data and experimentation regarding happiness research is in its infancy…

Mr. RICHARDS: Exactly. So we’re here to grow up rock n’ roll…

GROSS: Right. So…

Mr. RICHARDS: …and see how far it can go.

[link]
[podcast]

On Monday night at Mr. Chill’s Barber Shop, men passed on tie-tying knowledge they had gained from their fathers, grandfathers and uncles to a new generation.

I’ll Voluntie.

“When a government fears its people you have justice. When a people fears its government you have tyranny. When a car means nothing at all you can have ice cream.”

Suburu introduces, finally, a car like every other car.

The 2011 Mediocrity…
in Medium Crumb exterior with Brown Gravel interior. Black wheels, shift knob and emergency brake. Front grille, four doors, rear bumper, door handles and side-view mirrors also in Medium Crumb. Glove box and air vents.

Most Mainstream in its class.
If you’ve seen this mid-size sedan, you’ve pretty much seen them all.
If you’ve got nothing exciting to say, we’d love to hear it.

Well. : koff : Thanks for the shift knob.

Techdirt reports that The People’s Daily newspaper, which is the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, recently put up a review of Apple’s iPad:

“There are many disadvantages to the gadgets, it wrote. “For example you cannot install pirate software on them, you cannot download [free] music, and you need to pay for movies you watch on them.”

Or as Mike Masnick asks, What are they really saying?  “We know how much more powerful this device should be, and it’s a shame that it’s locked down, because that takes away much of its value.”

Zuckerburg, Facebook, that movie:

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point.

Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here.

And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success.

As ‘network neutrality’ gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea.

90% of social problems are a result of inappropriate education. Discuss…

I think this is a most intriguing item.

Walking along a crowded boulevard wired to a brain-boost dating service, will I pick out the girl for me?

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/brain-boost-for-information-overload.html

Think of anywhere – or any when – in the entire Universe where you might possibly want to go: you are, incredibly, already there.

Let’s ponder time travel, boys and girls.

Particles can sometimes appear to occupy points in space: with definable positions relative to some other object, such as the apparatus with which they are being viewed. When viewed in this manner, however, what the particle is actually doing cannot be ascertained. When we want to know what a particle is doing we have have to view it as a wave. This is called ‘wave-particle duality’ [wiki].

When a particle appears in its ‘wave-like’ form it could be described as being ‘smeared out’: that is, existing at more than one point – in more than one place in space and time. Okay, lets simplify things a little. Think of it this way: a particle is a wave with a ‘focal locality’. The focal locality is a point in space where most of the the wave’s ‘presence’ is concentrated or focused at any single point in time.

What fun.

We must conduct a ‘thought experiment’ —an experiment in our heads, not the real world:

Imagine a Universe in which there exists only a single planet. The planet possesses mass and, in the classic Einsteinian gravitational model fashion, warps space-time around itself to form a gravity well. [wiki]

On the planet there lives a man who builds a spaceship that he equips with a device that can detect warped space no matter how infinitesimally small the distortion might be. The man climbs into his spacecraft and blasts off.

As he travels outward from the planet he continually monitors the gradually decreasing amount by which the planet’s presence is warping the space around his craft. The question now becomes: how far out from the planet must the man travel before the space around his craft becomes completely flat?

You guessed it: It doesn’t matter how far the man travels – the further he goes space will continue to become flatter and flatter – but at no point will it become completely flat.

And so it is with our particle: As we move outward from the central focal locality; there is less and less particle present; at at no point however does the particle cease to have ‘presence’ completely.

The implications of this phenomenon are simply staggering: The particle exists at every single point throughout space and time.

Star Trek style teleportation will one day become possible because we all exist, we all have ‘presence’, throughout the totality of the Cosmos.

Think of anywhere – or any when – in the entire Universe where you might possibly want to go: you are, incredibly, already there.

[pic only] Why are these Walmart packages similar? :::shudder:::

The authors in Science and the Media find:

• The journalistic tradition of presenting opposing sides of an issue in order to ensure [claim] unbiased reporting may actually cloud scientific issues when views that fall outside the mainstream are given equal weight with consensus scientific thinking.
• Adults over age 35 never learned about relatively new areas of science like stem cells, nanotechnology and global warming in school and thus depend on the media for information about such topics.

Download the paper.

And that ain’t scratching the surface on how the poorly informed are screwing with us !

Oh, settle down, Brian, there’s a perfectly good template for journalists, science writers or not, that Dave Pollard discovered at the UK’s Guardian. Saved. Finally, facts can be delivered, theories hoisted accurately, models fully explained, breakthrough utilized, and thus good sense will spread across the world…

Is this an important scientific finding?

No. This is a news website article about a scientific paper.

This paragraph will explain that while some scientists believe one thing to be true, other people believe another, different thing to be true.

If the subject is politically sensitive this paragraph will contain quotes from some fringe special interest group of people who, though having no apparent understanding of the subject, help to give the impression that genuine public ‘controversy’ exists.

Controversy. Yup. That sells.

Folks crash.

Why not airbags built into the motorcycle suit?

Why not airbags for machine tool strike zones? Industrial fab and field worksite airbags?

Playing groin hockey with toddlers? Oh, the…

Over ten years, Alpinestars is shrinking modular Electronic Airbag Technology into skier and motorcycle suits which begin sales mid-2011. The patented first iteration is a one pound airbag powered by battery and triggered to full nitrogen inflation in less than 0.05 seconds.

I think I detect a permanent trend toward personal airbags.