Fossils Push Back Earliest Complex Animals 40 Million Years
A series of fossils unearthed in southwestern China has revealed the origins of complex life in unprecedented detail, and pushed its beginning back by at least 40 million years.
The specimens come from the Doushantuo formation, a layer of sediments deposited about 590 million years ago, just before the Ediacaran period’s primordial fauna gave way to the kaleidoscopically complex creatures of the Cambrian explosion.
During the Ediacaran, even the most structurally complicated animals had flat bodies with simple symmetry, like living quilts or mattresses. It was only during the Cambrian that animals developed what’s known as bilateral symmetry — a distinct front and back, top and bottom.
Pentagon used psychological operation on US public, documents show
A months-long review of documents and interviews with Pentagon personnel has revealed that the Bush Administration’s military analyst program — aimed at selling the Iraq war to the American people — operated through a secretive collaboration between the Defense Department’s press and community relations offices.
Raw Story has also uncovered evidence that directly ties the activities undertaken in the military analyst program to an official US military document’s definition of psychological operations — propaganda that is only supposed to be directed toward foreign audiences.
The investigation of Pentagon documents and interviews with Defense Department officials and experts in public relations found that the decision to fold the military analyst program into community relations and portray it as “outreach” served to obscure the intent of the project as well as that office’s partnership with the press office. It also helped shield its senior supervisor, Bryan Whitman, assistant secretary of defense for media operations, whose role was unknown when the original story of the analyst program broke.
Story continues over at Raw Story
Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension
THE MAN dangles on a cable hanging from an eight-storey-high tower. Suspended in a harness with his back to the ground, he sees only the face of the man above, who controls the winch that is lifting him to the top of the tower like a bundle of cargo. And then it happens. The cable suddenly unclips and he plummets towards the concrete below.
Panic sets in, but he’s been given an assignment and so, fighting his fear of death, he stares at the instrument strapped to his wrist, before falling into the sweet embrace of a safety net. A team of scientists will spend weeks studying the results.
The experiment was extreme, certainly, but the neuroscientist behind the study, David Eagleman at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, is no Dr Strangelove. When we look back at scary situations, they often seem to have occurred in slow motion. Eagleman wanted to know whether the brain’s clock actually accelerates – making external events appear abnormally slow in comparison with the brain’s workings – or whether the slo-mo is just an artefact of our memory.
It’s just one of many mysteries concerning how we experience time that we are only now beginning to crack. “Time,” says Eagleman, “is much weirder than we think it is.”
‘Octomom’ doctor expelled
If you don’t know who Octomom is then you’ll be surprised to know it is Nadya Denise Doud-Suleman Gutierrez, an American woman who came to international attention when she gave birth to octuplets in January 2009. The Suleman octuplets are only the second full set of octuplets to be born alive in the United States.
Surprisingly Suleman became pregnant after being artificially inseminated by Michael Kamrava, a fertility doctor from Beverly Hills. Public reaction turned negative when it was discovered that the single mother already had six other young children, also conceived via in-vitro fertilisation and was not financially independent.
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine has now expelled Kamrava from its organisation. Although this won’t stop him practising medicine, it should send a strong message to prospective parents about how fellow fertility doctors view his actions.
Catholicism on trial: Hitchens & Fry attack church’s record on gay rights
The Catholic Church is not a force for good in the world: that was the overwhelming verdict after a heated debate this week. Stephen Fry and author/journalist Christopher Hitchens opposed the motion, while Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, supported it. Adrian Tippetts gives his view of the debate.
During the two-hour showdown, organised by Intelligence Squared at the Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, Hitchens and Fry mercilessly and articulately lambasted the church for its record of homophobia, child abuse and anti-semitism, as well as its stance on contraception.
Christopher Hitchens wasted no time in living up to his reputation as a bulldog debater: “On the institutionalisation of rape and torture, the maltreatment of children in their care, [the current pope] Joseph Ratzinger said: ‘It is a very serious crisis which demands us in the need for applying to the victims, the most loving pastoral care.’ Well, I’m sorry, they have already had that.”
Full article on Pink News
Six diseases you never knew you could catch
Twentieth century medicine was phenomenally successful at developing vaccines and antibiotics to fight infectious diseases, taming ancient scourges such as smallpox, tuberculosis and typhoid. In the 1960s and 70s, the prevailing view was that all diseases caused by microorganisms would soon be conquered, leaving only those caused by genetics, unhealthy lifestyles or ageing.
That idea now seems naive, not least because of the rise in antibiotic resistance. And there’s another reason that no one even considered back then. A growing number of diseases that were thought to be down to genetics or lifestyle turn out to have an infectious origin.
Take stomach ulcers. Long thought to be triggered by stress, it emerged in the 1980s that many cases are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. Now a short course of antibiotics is all that’s needed to cure the condition, and in the west stomach ulcers are on the decline.
Since then, researchers have unearthed the unexpected infectious origins of several other diseases. In some the explanation is unique, but in others common mechanisms are at work.
For example, several autoimmune diseases arise because infection with a microbe triggers an immune attack, which cross-reacts with similar molecules from the host, causing the immune system to attack human tissues. And several cancers may be caused by viruses, sometimes because they insert themselves into our DNA and disrupt the genes that usually stop cells multiplying out of control.
The idea that lifelong conditions such as type 1 diabetes and obesity could be caught as easily as a cold is spine-chilling. Yet it raises the tantalising possibility that they could be treated with antibiotics or antiviral drugs, or possibly even prevented with a vaccine. So which of the following illnesses will be next to go the way of stomach ulcers?
New Scientist (Thanks SuZi)
Artist Philippe Ramette: An Upside Down World
The man in the suit is French conceptual artist Philippe Ramette and the gravity-defying view from his perch is not a trick. How on earth does he do it?
The French artist Philippe Ramette believes nothing should ever be faked. His improbable, gravity-defying poses might look like classic Photoshop, until you notice they are peppered with little incongruities. “You see a tension in my hands, my red face is far from serene as the blood rushes to it, my suit is ruffled.”
A sculptor, Ramette rose to fame in the 90s as part of the French contemporary art scene, creating strange wooden and metal instruments and objects. Photography was the logical next step, and through it he has created an odd, neo-romantic universe, using a carefully planned, rational approach to create totally irrational situations. In France, his bizarre images have been compared to the work of Buster Keaton and the world of silent cinema. For him, they are a statement about gravity, weightlessness and man’s relationship to the landscape.
Ramette, who still sees himself a sculptor rather than photographer, goes to extraordinary lengths to create his implausible set-ups, building hidden metal supports that he calls “sculpture-structures”.
Guardian (thanks, Gadgetfreakk)
‘Repressed Memory’ Is At Issue In Defrocked Priest’s Appeal
Defrocked priest Paul R. Shanley, one of the key figures in Boston’s clergy sex abuse scandal, plans to challenge his rape and indecent assault convictions before the state’s highest court today when his lawyer argues that the victim’s “repressed memory’’ was junk science.
Shanley’s appellate lawyer contends that prosecutors should not have been allowed to present evidence that the victim, a 27-year-old firefighter, buried memories of repeated abuse as a Sunday school student for two decades, only to recover them when the scandal erupted.
“Overwhelming evidence proves that the theory of ‘repressed memory’ is not generally accepted by the relevant scientific community on multiple grounds and that the commonwealth’s experts provided misleading junk science testimony that should not have been admitted in a judicial proceeding,’’ the lawyer, Robert F. Shaw Jr. of Cambridge, argues in his brief.
Nearly 100 psychiatrists, psychologists, and scientists have submitted a friend-of-the-court brief saying that the notion of people recovering repressed memories is “one of the most pernicious bits of folklore ever to infect’’ the fields of mental health. However, another large group, the Leadership Council, which consists of lawyers, academics, and scientists, has filed a brief saying repressed memory is a legitimate phenomenon.
Boston.com (thanks, Tammy)
Patrick Hughes – incredible illusionary painter
Patrick Hughes was born in Birmingham, England in October 1939. His first exhibition was in 1961 and his first reverspective was made in 1964. He has been exhibiting with Angela Flowers Gallery since 1970.
He has written and collated three books on visual and verbal rhetoric.
Hughes’ work is full of irony. By creating a world solidified into perspective he makes pictures that come alive before our eyes. In the myth of the sculptor Pygmalion makes a stone woman, whom Aphrodite brings to life as Galatea. Hughes makes wooden lumps of space and you bring them to life by looking at them. It is sculpted painting, solid space.
Check out the incredible optical illusion painting video on his site.
Patrick is 70 today. Happy Birthday
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
Just finished reading The Drunkard’s Walk. It’s very science based but is really quite amusing – it deals with the science of probability and randomness. There’s also a mention of winning lotteries and roulette wheel gambling. 
