Meet the woman who literally has no fear of anything
A 44-year-old woman who doesn’t experience fear has led to the discovery of where that fright factor lives in the human brain.
Researchers put out their best foot to try to scare the patient, who they refer to as “SM” in their write-up in the most recent issue of the journal Current Biology. Haunted houses, where monsters tried to evoke an avoidance reaction, instead evoked curiosity; spiders and snakes didn’t do the trick; and a battery of scary film clips entertained SM.
The patient has a rare condition called Urbach–Wiethe disease that has destroyed her amygdala, the almond-shaped structure located deep in the brain. Over the past 50 years studies have shown the amygdala plays a central role in generating fear responses in various animals from rats to monkeys.
Full article at LiveScience
Bulgarian TV reports of 8000 year old sun temple
The oldest temple of the Sun has been discovered in northwest Bulgaria, near the town of Vratsa, aged at more then 8000 years, the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) reported on December 15 2010.
The Bulgarian ‘Stonehenge’ is hence about 3000 years older than its illustrious English counterpart. But unlike its more renowned English cousin, the Bulgarian sun temple was not on the surface, rather it was dug out from under tons of earth and is shaped in the form of a horse shoe, the report said.
The temple was found near the village of Ohoden. According to archaeologists, the prehistoric people used the celestial facility to calculate the seasons and to determine the best times for sowing and harvest. The site was also used for rituals, offering gifts to the Sun for fertility as BNT reported.
This area of Bulgaria was previously made famous because remnants of the oldest people who lived in this part of Europe were found. Archaeologists also found dozens of clay and stone disks in the area of the temple.
“The semantics of the disks symbolise the disk of the Sun itself, which means that this is the earliest ever temple dedicated to the worship of the Sun God, discovered on our lands,” archaeologist Georgi Ganetsovski told the BNT.
Interplanetary pin-ups
It may / may not be too late to order for xmas – but these fantastic pin-ups by designer / artist Ross Berens are going in my xMas stocking.
Derren Brown – Next Shows On TV
Channel 4 have just confirmed that Derren Brown Night will be on Saturday 8th Jan.
It will consist of:
9pm Derren Brown: Behind The Mischief – one hour retrospective documentary celebrating Derren Brown.
10pm Derren Brown Viewer’s Choice – result of online vote to find the viewer’s favourite Derren Brown special.
11.05 Derren Brown Enigma – repeat of Derren Brown Enigma theatre show which will have its first air on Thurs 6th January at 9.30pm.
The evening will be linked by specially recorded introductions from the man himself, Mr Derren Brown.
The size of your brain’s visual cortex determines whether optical illusions fool you
“How we perceive the world is determined by the visual cortex, but not everybody’s cortex is created equal. One person’s visual cortex can be up to three times bigger than someone else’s, and size matters when it comes to perception.
The primary visual cortex has a far more active role in shaping how we see the world than anyone had suspected. Researchers at University College London discovered this when they were testing a pair of optical illusions on some test subjects. Here’s the first one, known as the Ebbinghaus illusion:
Which of the two circles at the center of the other circles is smaller? Most people will say the circle on the left is smaller than the circle on the right, but they’re actually the exact same size.”
Read more at io9 (Thanks Christopher C)
Scientists Find Clues Behind the Mystery of Amelia Earhart’s Disappearance
A tiny sliver of bone found on an island off the South Pacific may finally solve the riddle of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance 73 years ago.
Famed as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, Amelia Earhart vanished in a record attempt to circle the world’s equator. Later declared missing and eventually dead, many believed her plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. But now historians say they have found evidence to suggest Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan may have landed the plane and survived as castaways on the uninhabited island of Nikumaroro in the republic of Kiribati.
Many theories emerged after the disappearance of Earhart. The unresolved circumstances of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, along with her fame, attracted a great body of other claims relating to her last flight, all of which have been generally dismissed for lack of verifiable evidence. Several unsupported theories have become well known in popular culture.
Read more at News Feed
Amelia Earhart at Wikipeida
Massive Volcanism May Have Caused Biggest Extinction Ever
SAN FRANCISCO — The greatest extinction in the history of life may have been caused, in part, by ozone-depleting gases spewed in a massive volcanic eruption, a new study suggests. Geologists have found surprisingly high amounts of the elements fluorine and chlorine in Siberian lavas dating back 250 million years — when about 90 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial species went extinct.
Benjamin Black, a graduate student at MIT, and his colleagues described their theory Dec. 13 in a poster presentation at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Researchers have long struggled to explain the “Great Dying” that occurred at the end of the Permian period. Some think that the extinction was a long, drawn-out affair caused by multiple factors — perhaps gradual changes in oceanic or atmospheric chemistry (SN: 5/28/05, p. 339). Others have blamed a single catastrophic event such as a belch of methane from the seafloor or an asteroid impact (SN: 2/24/01, p. 116) like the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other species 65 million years ago.
Full Story at Wired Science
Have we finally cured HIV? Doctors claim success
Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection.
The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.
The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.
They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”
Full story over at Aidsmap.com
Ancient Chinese pyramids baffle scientists
No one seems to know the origin or the meaning behind a mysterious pyramid that sits atop Mount Baigong in western China that local legends claim is an alien UFO launch tower.
Nine scientists form the team that will travel to the western province of Qinghai and the mouth of this 165-198 foot tall structure known as the “ET Relics.”
“The pyramid has three caves with openings shaped like triangles on its façade and is filled with red-hued pipes leading into the mountain and a nearby salt water lake,” says China’s state-run Xinhua agency.
The site in question with its high altitude and thin, crisp air has long been considered an ideal astronomical location. Two of the three caves at the foot of the mountain have collapsed and are inaccessible. The remaining middle one, which is the largest, stands with its floor about 6 feet above the ground and its top about 9 feet above the surface.
Inside the cave, there is s a half-pipe about 40 centimeters in diameter tilting from the top to the inside of the cave. Another pipe of the same diameter goes into the earth with only its top visible above the ground. Dozens of strange pipes surround the opening with diameters ranging from 10 to 40 centimeters. Their structures indicate a highly advanced and completely unknown construction technique.
More info and pictures at Weird Asia
WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackers
“He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week’s battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.
He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.
“Greetings, fellow anons,” it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed “our weapons of choice” and a stark message: people needed to show their “hatred”.
Like most international conflicts, last week’s internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.
Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback’s initial target was America’s recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback’s anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.
Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: “[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare.”
The battle now centres on Washington’s fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks @incognitoDBer)
