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POPSBrain Matrix Responds To God Issues Cont: A first part of the study established a range or spectrum of religious beliefs relating to God's perceived involvement in this world, God's perceived emotion, and personal experiences as opposed to abstract doctrine. The second part examined how participants responded to religious statements reflecting those beliefs, with the help of fMRI scanners.
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POPSReplay During Sleep Consolidates Memories (Cont) During sleep, the hippocampus, a brain region important in learning and memory, repeatedly “replays” brain activity from recent awake experiences. This replay process is believed to be important for memory consolidation. In the new study at the University of Arizona they found reduced replay activity during sleep in old compared to young rats, and rats with the least replay activity performed the worst in tests of spatial memory.
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POPSPizza Grease Disastrous for Recycling Cont: "The oil gets in when you're doing your process of making paper," said Terry Gellenbeck, a solid waste administrative analyst for the City of Phoenix, Ariz. "The oil causes great problems for the quality of the paper, especially the binding of the fibers. It puts in contaminants, so when they do squeeze the water out, it has spots and holes." But what about other things regularly found on paper products, like ink? "Most inks are not petroleum-based so they break down fast. Food is a big problem," he said.
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POPSLight Me Up Neuroenhancement is not a goal for those prescribed these drugs for ADD/ADHD. The goals are freedom from distraction and impulsiveness. It concerns me that more profligate use might impact the availability of drugs for this legitimate purpose.
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POPSSoreness Unto Death This is an ongoing saga. Thousands of people overdose on acetaminophen (Tylenol) every year because they do not realize that it exists in tandem with so many other drugs, many sold over the counter. The daily maximum is 4,000 milligrams.
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POPSDogshit Presidency Bush, in one of his few public appearances since leaving office in January, told the students that leaving office lifted a heavy burden.
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POPSFrom Stress to Depression (cont) "We see big differences in people who have experienced acute stress compared to chronic stress," he says. "The machinery becomes very different." If the stress remains long enough, a person may develop major depression. It is this kind of finding, say the UM researchers, that provides one reason to believe that depression has important connections to the stress axis, and why much research at the MHRI on this topic has involved clinical studies of people with major depression. Overall, says Akil, the stress axis uses "nested loops" of neurons and chemical messengers to provide many avenues for regulating the body's response to stress. Controls via the genetic machinery appear to "define the limits" of the stress response. Other pathways probably provide the various nuances of response. Many control mechanisms, however, remain to be discovered.
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POPSInsanity in Alberta My first exposure to this travesty has been horrifying. This should never have been allowed. Time to stand up for clean fuels.
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POPSTed Nugent - Drug Czar In today's America, even with the Terminator serving as Governor of California, a conspiratorial wrestler as the former Governor of Minnesota, a variety show comedian likely to take a seat in the US Senate, and swirling reports that the President-elect is offering the job of Surgeon General to a television doctor ... Well, perhaps Nugent's plea shouldn't come as a surprise.
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POPSRat Lungworm - Acccch! Park said people cultivating home-grown vegetables need to clean them leaf by leaf, and warned that a species of slug on the Big Island has tiny larvae, about 1 to 2 millimeters l
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POPSBring On the Technology! I think this is great stuff. If humanists have any chance of being right about our ability to survive through ingenuity, this has got to be part of the brand.
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POPSMarriage Rights Granted In California! (cont) The last time California voters were asked to express their views on gay marriage at the ballot box was in 2000, the year after the Legislature enacted the first of a series of laws awarding spousal rights to domestic partners. Proposition 22, which strengthened the state's 1978 one-man, one-woman marriage law with the words "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," passed with 61 percent of the vote. The Supreme Court struck down both statutes with its sweeping opinion Thursday.
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POPSLonliness Impacts Brain Function (continuing on) About one if five Americans experience loneliness, Cacioppo said. And it is a growing problem in modern society in part because the average household size is decreasing. By 2010, 31 million Americans — roughly 10 percent of the population — will live alone, Cacioppo and his colleagues say. Previous work has suggested it can be as detrimental to health as smoking, Cacioppo said. In his book, "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection" (W.W. Norton, 2008), he presented evidence that loneliness is related to less blood flow through the body, poorer immune systems, increased levels of depression and a faster progression of Alzheimer's disease.
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POPSHaters On The Rise (cont) Last November, 37-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero, a 16-year resident of the U.S., was attacked while walking near his home in Patchogue, New York. Prosecutors say a group of seven teens taunted Lucero with racial slurs, beat him, and fatally stabbed him in the chest. The reason? According to prosecutors they were “beaner hopping”: attacking Hispanics for sport. All of the defendants have pled not guilty.
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POPSBill Joy's Worst Nightmare Cont: Nanoscale structures offer the opportunity to interface with cells on their own scale. In that sense, they have the potential to become "a totally new interface for living matter," Lieber says. His vision for nanoscale devices is not just to study cells but to use them to communicate with and control them. That in turn could lead to more precise neural prostheses to treat blindness or neurological diseases. "My overarching interest," he says, "is to ask whether one can blur the distinction between an electronic nonliving device and a living device, which is the cell."
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POPSI Miss The Oratory Nonetheless Obama's challenge now is to create inspiration from the work of governing itself, to do with the ideas of "duties to ourselves, our nation and the world" what Ronald Reagan did with boundless hope and individualism. In his warning of "a sapping of confidence across our land," Obama was surely aware that he echoed Jimmy Carter's "crisis of confidence," in his incorrectly named "Malaise Speech": "The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America."
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POPSGoogle Me Sentient "Although the present findings must be interpreted cautiously in light of the exploratory design of this study, they suggest that Internet searching may engage a greater extent of neural circuitry not activated while reading text pages, but only in people with prior computer and Internet search experience,"
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POPSOh Please Not Again? President Obama is starting to reveal the reason for worry in having a negotiator for a chief executive.
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POPSMo Money This is one of many articles that mentions the lack of stringency in the tests and therefore the lack of significance of the findings.
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POPSEverything Forgets Continuing: At a computer museum, you can't miss the point that, sooner or later, every recording format eventually gets left in the dust. In fact, these days, new formats are coming faster and faster, and each one expires faster than what came before it. "There's a consensus that as the ability to store more and more data , the data itself has become less and less reliable," said Don Mennerich, an archivist at the New York Public Library. He's been working on preserving some historic 1968 audio interviews with rock stars: Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love of The Beach Boys, Phil Everly. In 1996 the library tried to rescue those 30-year-old recordings by transferring them to fresh, brand-new tapes. But Mannerich says now, less than 12 years later, "those tapes are already significantly degraded. "The tape actually, physically will shed against the head of the tape player, u
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