Vegetative State Patients Can Respond To Questions
“Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts. The research, carried out in the UK and Belgium, involved a new brain scanning method. Awareness was detected in three other patients previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.
The study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that scans can detect signs of awareness in patients thought to be closed off from the world. Patients in a vegetative state are awake, not in a coma, but have no awareness because of severe brain damage. ”
Read more and watch the video at BBC News (Thanks LadyClaire and KirstyJ)
You Don’t Have To Be Bipolar To Be A Genius – But It Helps
“Scientists have for the first time found powerful evidence that genius may be linked with madness.
Speculation that the two may be related dates back millennia, and can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. Aristotle once claimed that “there is no great genius without a mixture of madness”, but the scientific evidence for an association has been weak – until now.
A study of more than 700,000 adults showed that those who scored top grades at school were four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder than those with average grades. ”
Read more at The Independent (thanks, Tammy)
Quantum Logic Clock – accurate to the nearest second for 3.7 Billion years
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world’s most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom.
The new aluminum clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measurements to be reported in Physical Review Letters.
The new clock is the second version of NIST’s “quantum logic clock,” so called because it borrows the logical processing used for atoms storing data in experimental quantum computing, another major focus of the same NIST research group. The second version of the logic clock offers more than twice the precision of the original.
“This paper is a milestone for atomic clocks” for a number of reasons, says NIST postdoctoral researcher James Chou, who developed most of the improvements.
In addition to demonstrating that aluminum is now a better timekeeper than mercury, the latest results confirm that optical clocks are widening their lead—in some respects—over the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, the U.S. civilian time standard, which currently keeps time to within 1 second in about 100 million years.
Schizophrenia Isn’t Just A Mental Illness, it’s a skin disorder too.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that the effects of schizophrenia appear to extend beyond the brain. And now there’s talk of a blood test to diagnose schizophrenia being rolled out within a year.
Because schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder, it was previously believed that the signs of the illness would be contained only within the brain. However, the team at the Cambridge Institute for Psychiatric Research, led by Sabine Bahn, has identified genetic markers of the disorder in cell division, the immune system, and glucose metabolism. They have found that one of the best peripheral indicators of schizophrenia is a systemic problem in protein expression in the skin cells of the patient’s arms.
Full article at i09
Super-Hard Diamonds Found In Meteorite
“Researchers using a diamond paste to polish a slice of meteorite stumbled onto something remarkable: crystals in the rock that are harder than diamonds.
A closer look with an array of instruments revealed two totally new kinds of naturally occurring carbon, which are harder than the diamonds formed inside the Earth.
“The discovery was accidental but we were sure that looking in these meteorites would lead to new findings on the carbon system,” said Tristan Ferroir of the Universite de Lyon in France. ”
Read more at Discovery News
Man Says Police Destroyed Mystical Powers
“An Oregon man claims in a lawsuit Idaho police destroyed the mystical powers of a medicine bag when they opened it during his drunken driving arrest in August.
Craig Clark Show, 49, of Portland said the bag provided protection, had been blessed by a medicine woman and had remained closed since 1995, the Sandpoint (Idaho) Bonner County Daily Bee reported Friday.
The suit seeks $25,000 in damages.
Show was stopped on U.S. Highway 95 in Granite Hill while riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle and was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after a test revealed a blood alcohol level of 0.16, police said. ”
Read more at UPI (thanks, SuZi)
Illinois Politician Claims Atheist Sign Is ‘Hate Speech’
“William J. Kelly, a Chicago Republican, is suing the Illinois Secretary of State for allowing an atheist sign to be placed next to a nativity scene in the state capitol.
The sign read: “At the time of the winter solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is just a myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds,” according to the federal complaint filed last Thursday.
Kelly, who is running for the Republican nomination for state comptroller, tried to turn the sign face-down when he saw it during a visit to the Capitol on December 23, 2009, but Capitol police escorted him from the building, banned him for the day and filed an incident report, according to a CBS 2 report. ”
Read more at Huffington Post
Identity Exhibition
“Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives
26 November 2009 – 06 April 2010
What influences or determines our sense of who we are? What makes one person distinct from another? How does science inform human identity? This major new exhibition explores the tension between the way we view ourselves and how others see us.
Explore the subject of genetic testing. How curious are you about the information in your DNA?
Nine individual stories introduce eight distinct rooms. One room begins with the story of scientist Alec Jeffreys’ invention of DNA fingerprinting 25 years ago, the diaries of Samuel Pepys introduce another, while self-portraiture is explored through the work of the Jewish artist Claude Cahun, who despite being sentenced to death for acts of resistance, survived the Nazi occupation of Jersey.
Find out more about Clive Wearing, whose diaries are featured in the Samuel Pepys room
Other subjects tackled include twins, phrenology and brain imaging, gender and sexuality, race and prejudice, and acting and improvisation.
This exhibition is free. ‘Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives’ is part of The Identity Project.”
Read more at Wellcome Collection (Thanks James)
Internet Uprising Overturns Australian Censorship Law
“The state of South Australia has a new election law that went into effect January 6, and its effect was shocking: anonymous political speech on the Internet was simply destroyed.
The law required anyone posting a political comment online during an election period to supply their real name and address or face a fine of up to AUS$1,250. The measure was grossly discriminatory—it applied only to bloggers and commenters, not to online “journals” (newspapers or magazine which are written by Real Journalists).
Politicians had apparently developed a thin skin to anonymous commentary, some of which no doubt did devolve into rank defamation, but Australia already has defamation laws that could be used against truly egregious material. Ending online anonymous speech was an extreme solution, one not appreciated by the targets of the law.”
Read more at Ars Technica
Hacked Emails Between Scientists Reveal Flaws In Peer Review
“Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.
But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.
Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
Read more at The Guardian
