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POPS7 Terrible Abuses Suffered By Women Around The World Barbaric - we have no right to call ourselves developed nations of the 21st century until such scourges are removed from the face of this earth forever and those guilty of these heinous crimes are severely punished. I ask what 'honor' do people speak of when they treat women so degradingly?!
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POPSThe way the brain buys Scientists used to assume that emotion and rationality were opposed to each other, but Antonio Damasio, now professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has found that people who lose the ability to perceive or experience emotions as the result of a brain injury find it hard or impossible to make any decisions at all. They can’t shop. ergo we shop with our hearts..;-)
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POPSTreating wounded soldiers like $#%$% I'm as much to blame as anyone, but i really am disappointed that the American people site by so idly while the Bush administration screws people so badly. It's great that we "disapprove" of them in polls, but when push comes to shove, we are allowing them to do whatever they want...and the results are truly sickening.
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POPSA Most Private Evolution Trying to understand counterintuitive sexual parts and habits follows in the best of scientific traditions. As Charles Darwin worked on evolution, he pondered male phenomena that looked useless, or even harmful, for surviving. Outsized horns on male beetles puzzled him, as did male birds with gorgeous plumage. Out of this consternation came his insight into a process he called sexual selection, which he distinguished from natural selection. There may be survival of the fittest, but there’s also survival of the sexiest. “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” Darwin wrote in a letter to the botanist Asa Gray, albeit in a whimsical paragraph. Nauseated or not, Darwin was willing to step beyond survival of the fittest.
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POPSUK Snow Pictures Of course, the UK media always go wild if a bit of snow falls, especially in London. But 's no joke when you remember the less reported sitings of zombie snowmen.
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POPSBorderline Personality Disorder "...What defines borderline personality disorder--and makes it so explosive--is the sufferers' inability to calibrate their feelings and behavior. When faced with an event that makes them depressed or angry, they often become inconsolable or enraged. Such problems may be exacerbated by impulsive behaviors: overeating or substance abuse; suicide attempts; intentional self-injury. (The methods of self-harm that borderlines choose can be gruesomely creative. One psychologist told me of a woman who used fingernail clippers to pull off slivers of her skin.""
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POPSS&M Porn Illegal-Real Life Torture-OK! But for our highest government officials, including the ones responsible for this prosecution, we have a different story altogether. In 2002, the Bush DOJ radically re-defined "torture" and illegal treatment of detainees to exclude anything that falls short of "the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." The DOJ's John Yoo even decreed that the President could legally order "'scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance' thrown on a prisoner" and possibly even "slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb."
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POPSCatholic Church gone mad On rape and Catholic justice: This is why morals from 3rd century goat herders stink. Clearly no moral guidance exists here, let alone moral guidance from above.
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POPSUS Hypocrisy Astonishes the World The exceptional “virtuous nation” does not think it is insensitive for America’s bombs to blow innocent villagers to pieces. What does the world think of the United States? The US government is like a criminal who accuses the police of his crime when he is arrested or a sociopathic abuser who blames the victim. It is a known fact that the CIA has violated US law and international law with its assassinations, kidnappings and torture. But it is not this criminal agency that will be held accountable. Instead, those who will be punished will be those moral beings who, appalled at the illegality and inhumanity of the CIA, leaked the evidence of the agency’s crimes. America uber alles! No one counts but us (and Israel). The deaths we inflict and the pain and suffering we bring to others are merely collateral damage on the bloody path to American hegemony.
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POPSMy stroke of Insight "How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career." Jill Bolte Taylor (TED talk video at source)
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POPSLike running through hell "How marathon runners could be a scientific window into the neuropsychology of trauma owing to the fact that they experience extremely high levels of the stress hormone cortisol'
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POPSMale menopause? Yes, it’s real Andropause is a medical condition, diagnosed with a blood test by a physician that reveals testosterone levels below a certain level. If a diagnosis of andropause is warranted, treatment with testosterone replacement may be an option, depending on a man’s health history. However, the biggest, and most misunderstood, symptom of declining testosterone is a decrease in libido. Testosterone is truly the hormone that stokes the flames of desire. Many men confuse andropause with erectile dysfunction (ED), because they often occur around the same time. These men often turn to an ED medication, such as Viagra, to improve their erectile ability, which works for a time in most cases. However, as men get older, the gap between desire and arousal widens and many men become deeply disappointed when Viagra doesn't give them the desire to have sex. That's because Viagra doesn't boost testosterone levels.<<
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POPSRobotic Exoskeleton Allows a Paralyzed Man to Walk - inspirational! "ReWalk consists of motorised leg supports, body sensors and a back pack that contains a computer and rechargeable batteries. Users still need crutches to help with balance. To move, the user picks a setting with a remote control wrist band – “stand”, “sit”, “walk”, “descend” or “climb” – and then leans forward, activating the body sensors and setting the robotic legs in motion"
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POPSMust-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual One author's mostly optimistic prediction of the ideas that will come to define our collective future. Nicely done. Open Source : This is a term that most people are familiar with, but it’s worth re-stating. The open source revolution, where information is freely distributed and editable, is already reshaping a number of industries and upsetting traditional economic and intellectual property models. Wikipedia has very quickly become the world’s largest repository of encyclopedic information. Linux and other open source software continue to rival the big players. And looking further down the line, there’s the potential for open source science, culture, and the disturbing potential for open source warfare.
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POPSAlien Hand Syndrome Another totally weird syndrome! I find these disorders fascinating. So much can be learned about the human mind and consciousness if we ever learn to understand these disorders. I have heard of several cases where that hand is aggressive and tries to choke or hit and harm the *owner* constantly. Creepy... The Anarchic Hand
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POPSA Robomedic for the Battlefield Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing technology to give battlefield medics a helping hand--literally. Howie Choset, an associate professor of robotics at CMU, has engineered a snakelike robotic arm equipped with various sensors that can monitor a soldier's condition. The robot can be wirelessly controlled via a joystick, so that a doctor at a remote clinic may move the robot to any point on a soldier's body to assess his injuries as he's being carried to a safe location. The robot's serpentine flexibility allows it to maneuver within tight confines, so that, in case a casualty can't be extracted from the battlefield immediately, the robot can perform an initial medical assessment in the field.
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POPSAn End to Paralysis with Artificial Brain-to-Muscle Connectors Say the researchers: Until now, brain-computer interfaces were designed to decode the activity of neurons known to be associated with movement of specific body parts. Here, the researchers discovered that any motor cortex cell, regardless of whether it had been previously associated with wrist movement, was capable of stimulating muscle activity. This finding greatly expands the potential number of neurons that could control signals for brain-computer interfaces and also illustrates the flexibility of the motor cortex. Human implementations for the technology are at least a decade away, but this discovery could be a game-changer for dealing with paralysis. One possibility would be to connect the motor cortex with an area of the spine below an injury. Signals would be re-routed around the damaged spinal cord, and could allow the brain to regain control of the paralyzed body parts affected by the injury.