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POPSA Terror Trial Debacle Happening Right Now A U.S.-trained Pakistani scientist linked to al-Qaida got into trouble again Monday in federal court after twice interrupting the sometimes tearful testimony of an American solider who claimed he shot her in self defense in Afghanistan in 2008. “I feel sorry for you,” Aafit Saddiqui blurted out at one point at her attempted murder trial in Manhattan. After a judge had deputy U.S. marshals remove her, she pointed at the witness and muttered something else before disappearing behind a side door. U.S. District Judge Richard Berman allowed Saddiqui to return later, but kicked her out again amid another rambling tirade about injustice. At the end of the day, the defense argued that the removals made her look bad in front of the jury and asked for a mistrial, which the judge denied. “It’s highly appropriate for her to be escorted out of the courtroom when she acts out,” he said. Siddiqui " a specialist in neuroscience who trained at the Massachusetts
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POPSFree online video courses from leading universities This site is a treat for graduate and post-graduate academics. The resource strives to collect video lectures by professors from universities such as Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Yale. From Walter Lewin’s popular MIT lectures on physics to Guy Kawasaki’s talks at Stanford on Entrepreneurship, the site covers a variety of subjects, including economics, philosophy, medicine, religion, engineering, political science, and more.Those with a thirst for knowledge could spend hours on this one
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POPSNeuroscience In The Justice System
Just wonderful. "One of the most controversial ways neuroscience is being used in the courtroom is through 'mind reading' and the detection of mental states. While only courts in New Mexico currently permit traditional lie detector, or polygraph, tests there are a number of companies claiming to have used neuroscience methods to detect lies. Some of these methods involve electroencephalography (EEG), whereby brain activity is measured through small electrodes placed on the scalp. This widely accepted method of measuring brain electrical potentials has already been used in two forensic techniques which have appeared in US courtrooms: brain fingerprinting and brain electrical oscillations signature (BEOS). Brain fingerprinting purportedly tests for 'guilty knowledge,' or memory of a kind that only a guilty person could have. Other forms of guilt detection, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are based on the assumption that lying and truth-telling are associated with d
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POPSYou won't find consciousness in the brain I never knew I was a "neurosceptic". Neuroscience uses the same basic metaphorical language problem as quantum physics. See: http://openintelligence.amplify.com/2010/01/17/is-there-a-language-problem-with-quantum-physics-1/ This persepective also raises serious questions about: http://openintelligence.amplify.com/2010/01/14/carnegie-mellon-scientists-crack-brains-codes-for-noun-meanings/
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POPSIrish Woman Explains Muslim Conversion “There’s beauty in all religions. Islam is a very inclusive path. It never claims exclusive access to God or to paradise,” she explained. “Everything fell into place when I read it. There is one God, one people, one humanity and one message.” While finding Islam was relatively easy, O’Leary’s conversion was not. Her parents were devout Catholics, and she said they were not supportive when she decided to convert. They have gotten used to it, she says, but they still do not embrace it. In Islam, this life’s struggle is known as jihad, an internal quest of self-improvement and patience. She went on to say, "Happiness is a warm gun - a picture of Bin Laden and an Irish Ceili dance."
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POPSDo Animals Feel Empathy? Do animals feel empathy? This question could draw scoffing dismissal from many scientists only a few decades ago. Now it receives marvelously productive attention in neuroscience, psychology, and the burgeoning field of neuroethology. Below, two leaders in these fields, Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal and University of Chicago neurobiologist Peggy Mason, review both the history of animal studies of empathy and a particularly thought-provoking recent mouse study from the McGill University lab of Jeffrey Mogil. As de Waal and Mason note, this clever study holds surprises about both the baseline and the limitations of empathy in these small, "simple" rodents. One can't read these reviews without seeing one's own empathetic capacities and limitations in a new light.
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POPSunwanted side effects:cocaine vaccine leads addicts to take 10 times more cocaine this has never been my drug of choice-but i have many friends who's lives have been crippled by this junk- anyways- they talk of this unwanted side effect- of trying to overcompensate - by taking more cocaine............i read about tests done in where they took out- surgically removed the pleasure centers of addicts brains - in hopes of killing the cause and effect of the addiction- nope- these people were still addicted to cocaine- though they no longer had any perceivable "feeling" to taking the drug- frightening ughhh......and very sad methadone will do the same thing for junkies too- they try to do heroin- before their daily dose- of methadone kicks in - in hopes they will feel the high........
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POPSAccept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest. The physics students, for instance, didn’t watch the video and wonder whether Galileo might be wrong. Instead, they put their trust in theory, tuning out whatever it couldn’t explain. Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.
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POPSHidden Sensory System Discovered in the Skin The human sensory experience is far more complex and nuanced than previously thought, according to a groundbreaking new study published in the December 15 issue of the journal Pain. In the article, researchers at Albany Medical College, the University of Liverpool and Cambridge University report that the human body has an entirely unique and separate sensory system aside from the nerves that give most of us the ability to touch and feel. Surprisingly, this sensory network is located throughout our blood vessels and sweat glands, and is for most people, largely imperceptible.
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POPSTwitter and the Global Brain In fact, judging by Twitter's Trending Topics, the re-tweeting process does not point to either good, or important content. Of course, it may not be right to assume that a global brain will be smarter, and real significance will be lost in the tsunami of celebrity drivel.
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POPSA Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain “I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels " the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.
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