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POPSBrain That Changes Itself "The brain is a far more open system than we ever imagined, and nature has gone very far to help us perceive and take in the world around us. It has given us a brain that survives in a changing world by changing itself'
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POPSDoomsday - The Mayan Prophesy December 21st, 2012. I probably won't be home that day, but I'll catch it later on youtube, I reckon. Jokes aside, they say the Mayan (or Atzec) calender is the most accurate ever made. Their doomsday is not so much about the end of time, but of the beginning or dawn of a new age of enlightenment. I think it's worth a gander. ;) This video explains the Mayan calender pretty well. Part one of three; The Mayan Calender Unveiled
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POPSSCIENTISTS SHOW HALLUCINOGEN CREATES UNIVERSAL “MYSTICAL” EXPERIENCE in the 1950s, showed signs of therapeutic potential or value in research into the nature of consciousness and sensory perception. “Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon,” Schuster says. “Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation.” “A vast gap exists between what we know of these drugs-mostly from descriptive anthropology-and what we believe we can understand using modern clinical pharmacology techniques,” says study leader Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor with Hopkins’ departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry and Behavioral Biology. “That gap is large because, as a reaction to the excesses of the 1960s, human research with hallucinogens has been basically frozen in time these last forty years.”
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POPSCashier Attacks Deaf Man for Not Talking "Upon further investigation, it appeared the suspect became frustrated when the victim wouldn't respond or acknowledge his attempts to converse," Sullivan said. "He became outraged and struck the victim in an unwarranted attack." The store's surveillance tape was erased or taped over before the officers got there.
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POPSA New State Of Mind But that view of the neurotransmitter was vastly oversimplified. What wasn’t yet clear was that dopamine is also a profoundly important source of information. It doesn’t merely let us take pleasure in the world; it allows us to understand the world.
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POPSAm I a terrorist now?!? Be careful what you read online?!? Damn, I protest this! Sheesh, according to the Patriot Act § 802 and the definitions of domestic terrorism, legitimate protest could be prosecuted as terrorism! I kid you not! Hey, maybe this very clip could put me i Guantanamo! Folks, you'd better not pop this clip or they'll probably accuse you of giving me "material support" and end up in the cage next to mine! Oops, too late, if you've already read this far... Sheesh! Where will it end?!? Oh, well...orange suits me :o( (please send care packages)
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POPSUSS Liberty Conspiracy Unravelling, at last!
"The documents also suggest that the US government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the US., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation. "In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief US electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty . "An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman called the attack a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the families of those
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POPSOut Of The Blue I'm saving this for a lazy Sunday afternoon. (This movie was mentioned on Larry King)
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POPSScramble To Curb Suicide Websites Hmm. I am all for protecting the vulnerable, but this smells a little too much like censorship, to me What else could or would governments decide to deem "harmful information"? Do I trust they always would have my best interests at heart, if they get to decide what we can read or not? In my opinion, the causes of suicide largely lie offline, not on. If we want to reduce suicide, look to answer the questions why first, now how. "Guns don't kill people", and neither do webpages.
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POPSBeauty and the Brain Future work may elucidate the long-term effects of one's surroundings on brain function and the relationship between aesthetically pleasing spaces and their functionality. What one considers beautiful is, of course, influenced by culture, learning, and experience, and not everything we find beautiful will ultimately be traceable to the structure and function of our brain. The larger question "What is beauty?" still poses a major challenge, but answering it no longer seems so impossible.
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POPSHistory: The Revenge of 9/11 ? CIA. "It is fair to say that this $50 billion a year a intelligence organization, supposedly the most competent in the world, was amazingly unaware of the plans or derelict in delivering intelligence. It is fair to say the CIA was guilty of neglect, incompetence and/or active participation with the government and all the usual suspects in coordinating an effort to create 9/11. This in order to bring about a coup of our “democratic” government. As a result, this same cadre declared war on Afghanistan, part of their larger "War on Terror," only days later, without any further investigation to determine “whodunit,” railroading a fearful Congress into agreement."
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POPSWhy The Media Should Apologize To Sarah She gave a really good speech. And why go beyond that? As we all know, speeches cannot be written by others and rehearsed for days. They are true windows to the soul. Unless they are delivered by Barack Obama, that is. In which case, as Palin said Wednesday, speeches are just a “cloud of rhetoric.”
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POPSDiscovered: Artifacts from the First Temple of Solomon I think the time has come to open up these areas to tastefull, scholastic investigation, so that we can organize and preserve the relics that may be contained here in. Religion need not be at odds with the accumulation of humanistic knowledge, in fact religious significance is often a great complement to the field of archeology, as is archeology to important aspects of ancient religious history.
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POPSSupermarkets Throwing Away 2 Million Tons Of Food A Year We visited a dozen stores over several nights last week to check what was being thrown away and discovered hundreds of pounds worth of food dumped. At a Sainsbury’s superstore next to the Dome in Greenwich, South East London – the chain’s flagship “environmentally-friendly” shop with its own wind turbines – staff said it was standard practice to throw away food before its sell-by date. And they’re not even allowed to take it home. One said: “Someone just stands there and throws it into the skip. We wish we could buy it – but we’re not allowed.” Pointing to meat on the “reduced” shelf, he added: “Come midnight, anything that hasn’t been sold will get taken off the shelf... if it’s out of date it will be logged on the computer, put against our losses, then in the skip.” Four-pint bottles of milk with nine days still to run had been thrown out, along with nine cans of cola with a date stamp of April 2009.
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POPSPat Tillman Murdered? Pat Tillman was an atheist. He was killed under suspicious circumstances. Could it be that they burned his diary to hide that his "men" got rid of him for his atheism?
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POPSIs The Government Secretly Testing Americans? "It turns out, until just nine years ago the government had the right, under U.S. law, to conduct secret testing on the American public, under specific conditions. Only a public outcry repealed part of that law, with some "exceptions."