05.07.07
Posted in Evolution, health, Religion/Philosophy at 10:50 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about using a selfish gene model to selectively breed insects. Their eventual goal is to create malaria-resistant mosquitos.
This article talks about how to wire your brain for religious transcendance. The article talks about modern methods of cranial stimulation, and then moves on to chemicals and traditional hallucinogens.
This article talks about the current trend of mind games (games that help exercise your mind). I’m sure most people have heard about Brainage. The article also talks about a brain training program by PositScience that is scientifically proven to help the mind.
In a recent PNAS paper, Merzenich’s lab announced that PositScience was able to reverse “age-related cognitive decline” in a randomized and controlled study of 182 subjects. Of those trained with PositScience, 93 percent showed significant cognitive improvement. “We’ve demonstrated that you can take the brain of a 75-year-old,” Merzenich says, “and make it function like the brain of a 35- or 40-year-old. It takes training, and some hard work, but it’s possible.” Preliminary results of a second trial study suggest that PositScience can even help stave off memory loss in the early stages of Alzheimer’s patients. After just four weeks, senile patients showed significant cognitive improvement. The control group, on the other hand, continued to decline.
Also this article enumerates 17 criteria for consciousness. Its a bit technical to read. Here are my two favorites:
Property 1: “Irregular” patterns of brain activity
Electrical oscillations occuring between 20 and 70 times per second are common in awake humans, but epilepsy, sleep, anesthesia and some forms of brain damage are accompanied by the dominance of highly regular oscillations slower than 4 Hz. Others have argued that the conscious EEG is characterized by a particular noise signature known as “pink” or “1/f” noise. Although the purpose of these peculiar electrical oscillations is poorly understood, they appear to be a consistent feature of primate consciousness.
Property 6: Present-centeredness
Seth et al. argue that consciousness is centered on the present, probably for evolutionary reasons, and that this present-centeredness may arise from the fact that the dynamic core of neural activity is in constant flux.
The second one seems very zen-like to me.
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05.06.07
Posted in society at 11:35 am by site admin
Ok. I’m just jotting down all these articles I’ve seen lately. I suppose I am just another blogger that shamelessly reposts articles. In any case, check out this article talking about the non-human nature of modern warfare. Modern instruments of death are so diverse and efficient that killing someone can be as simple as pushing a button thousands of miles away.
“War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”
–Winston Churchill
Couple this ability with the modern worlds high levels of safety and longevity, and you can see how easy it is for some people to become so firmly attached to a belief with no regards for our common humanity. I recently attended a talk by the Dalai Lama at Rice University on May 1st, and he said the following with respect to human compassion and tolerance:
Billions of people, only one earth.
-Dalai Lama
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Posted in Evolution, health at 11:24 am by site admin
Check out this article title “Hacking your Body’s Bacteria for Better Health” talking about how modern human sanitary customs, e.g. anti-bacterial soap, mouth wash, bathroom cleaners, is causing a wide-range of health concerns. Doesn’t make sense? Well anti-bacterial cleaners kill all kinds of bacterial— both the good and the bad. So in an effort to kill the bad ones, we destroy the good ones in our body that live symbiotically, providing us protection and assisting our body.
But some scientists say we’re overdoing it. All this killing may actually cause diseases like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome and even diabetes. The answer, they say, is counterintuitive: Feed patients bacteria.
“Probiotics (pills containing bacteria) have resulted in complete elimination of eczema in 80 percent of the people we’ve treated,” says Dr. Joseph E. Pizzorno Jr., a practicing physician and former member of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Pizzorno says he’s used probiotics to treat irritable bowel disease, acne and even premenstrual syndrome. “It’s unusual for me to see a patient with a chronic disease that doesn’t respond to probiotics.”
I especially like this quote:
To more precisely hack the gut bacteria, Blaser calls for a Gut Genome Project, modeled after the Human Genome Project. It’s a daunting task: The human genome, mapped to great fanfare but still dimly understood, contains a tenth of the genes believed to be in our gut bacteria. But though difficult, such research could prove vital.
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Posted in health at 11:13 am by site admin
Check out this article talking about how men run hot and women run cold. In the study they did, they report that men typically wanted the thermostat a few degrees lower than women. One of the comments questioned the equity of clothing; men typically wear thicker clothing than women.
On a related note, this website talks about how higher head temperatures can cause loss of hair. In other words, if you always wear a hat, you will go bald. The website talks about this guys theories and his experiences about hair loss, including male pattern baldness. I’m not sure how rigorous his methods are, but I have heard of stories about how long time nuns loose their hair. When the nuns were allowed to not wear their hoods, they slowly started regrowing their hair. It makes sense because the body must maintain a certain range of temperature internally.
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