In 1986 Peter had the idea of growing a chair. Nine years later Peter and Becky became partners. Pooktre was born. Together they have mastered the art they call Pooktre, which is the shaping of trees as they grow in predetermined designs. Some are intended for harvest to be high quality indoor furniture and others will remain living art.

See More: Pooktre

(via Grinding)

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Brain-imaging studies performed in animals at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory provide researchers with clues about why an increasingly popular recreational drug that causes hallucinations and motor-function impairment in humans is abused. Using trace amounts of Salvia divinorum - also known as “salvia,” a Mexican mint plant that can be smoked in the form of dried leaves or serum - Brookhaven scientists found that the drug’s behavior in the brains of primates mimics the extremely fast and brief “high” observed in humans. Their results are now published online in the journal NeuroImage.

Full Story: Brookhaven National Laboratory

(via Grinding)

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Rose Colored news returns to regular operations

Crime prevention organization making a difference in Chicago

Man grows new finger thanks to ground-up pig bladder

Argentina Decriminalizes Drug Consumption

Alaska: Appeals Court Cracks Down on Coercive Searches

Low cost, small scale wind turbines to power off-grid villages

Gel-like Material Shows Promise As Oral Insulin Pill For Diabetes

Bakeries urge customers to plant wheat in their lawns

Florida: No crime in photo of undercover officer

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The photos of his severed finger tip are pretty graphic. You can understand why doctors said he’d lost it for good.

Today though, you wouldn’t know it. Mr Spievak, who is 69 years old, shows off his finger, and it’s all there, tissue, nerves, nail, skin, even his finger print.

‘Pixie dust’

How? Well that’s the truly remarkable part. It wasn’t a transplant. Mr Spievak re-grew his finger tip. He used a powder - or pixie dust as he sometimes refers to it while telling his story.

Mr Speivak’s brother Alan - who was working in the field of regenerative medicine - sent him the powder.

For ten days Mr Spievak put a little on his finger.

[…]

The process he has been pioneering over the last few years involves scraping the cells from the lining of a pig’s bladder.

Full Story: BBC (includes videos)

(via The Agitator)

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An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe — the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity — may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur’s supposed mind-altering effects .

The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof.

In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as “the Green Fairy” that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned.

The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe’s reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation.

Full Story: Live Science

(via The Daily Grail)

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The latest issue of Wired is dedicated to intelligence enhancement - and it’s filled with interesting articles and tips.

Wired: Get Smarter issue.

Here’s a taste:

Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities.

[…]

David Geary, a professor at the University of Missouri and author of The Origin of Mind, who was not involved with the study, said training in one test generally doesn’t generate gains on a different test.

“Transfer is tough to get,” Geary said. “Training in task A doesn’t typically improve performance on task B.”

But in this case, subjects trained on a complex version of the so-called “n-back task” — a difficult visual/auditory memory test — improved their scores on a set of IQ questions drawn from a German intelligence measure called the Bochumer Matrizen-Test. (The Bochumer Matrizen-Test is a harder version of the well-known Ravens Progressive Matrices).

Initially, the test subjects scored an average of 10 questions correctly on the IQ test.

But after the group trained on the n-back task for 25 minutes a day for 19 days, they averaged 14.7 correct answers, an increase of more than 40 percent. (A control group that was not trained showed only a very slight performance increase.)

Buschkuehl’s team postulates that the n-back task improves working memory — how many pieces of information subjects can keep in their head — as well as the ability to control the brain’s attention. Fluid intelligence tests require those types of thinking, and the training improved performance in these underlying skills.

Full Story: Wired

However, they note elsewhere that Brain Age hasn’t been proved to make you smarter.

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China is preparing an arsenal of rockets and aircraft to protect the Olympics opening ceremony from rain, hoping to disperse clouds before they can drench dignitaries at the roofless “bird’s nest” stadium.

Officials believe there is a 47 percent probability of rain during the August 8 opening ceremony and a 6 percent chance of a heavy downpour and will try to drain humidity from clouds before they reach Beijing.

More than 100 staff at 21 stations surrounding the city will have 10 minutes’ notice to fire rockets or cannons containing silver iodide at approaching clouds in the hope of making them rain before they reach the stadium. Three aircraft will also be on stand-by to drop catalysts to unleash rain from the clouds.

Full Story: Yahoo! News

(Phase II)

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The Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls, painted in 1819 by Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825), consist of beautifully realistic, if not gruesome, depictions of scientific human dissection.

Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions.

Full Story and More Illustrations: Pink Tentacle

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Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.

These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”

At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.

Full Story: Science Daily.

(Thanks Jasper!)

See also:

Does the Earth’s magnetic field cause suicides?

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A team of European scientists has deliberately triggered electrical activity in thunderclouds for the first time, according to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal. They did this by aiming high-power pulses of laser light into a thunderstorm.

At the top of South Baldy Peak in New Mexico during two passing thunderstorms, the researchers used laser pulses to create plasma filaments that could conduct electricity akin to Benjamin Franklin’s silk kite string. No air-to-ground lightning was triggered because the filaments were too short-lived, but the laser pulses generated discharges in the thunderclouds themselves.

“This was an important first step toward triggering lightning strikes with laser beams,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the University of Lyon in France. “It was the first time we generated lighting precursors in a thundercloud.” The next step of generating full-blown lightning strikes may come, he adds, after the team reprograms their lasers to use more sophisticated pulse sequences that will make longer-lived filaments to further conduct the lightning during storms.

Full Story: Eureka Alert

(via Warren Ellis)

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It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on the open source teledildonics projects at Slashdong, but luckily Grinding tipped me off to this:

Ladies and gentlemen, you can - oh, sorry, I’ll start again. Gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce you can now literally have sex with your computer. Those noble innovators at Slashdong have taken the humble fleshlight device, and published detailed instructions on extactly how to control your favourite PC game with your penis.

The article gives instructions on hooking it up to some 3d sex game, but of course now that it’s loose on teh interwub, someone will get it operational for SecondLife. And then World of Warcraft - imagine grinding your way through a few instances purely through pelvis power!

Full Story: Slashdong

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In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

According to a new economic analysis (.pdf) presented at this week’s In Vitro Meat Symposium in Ås, Norway, meat grown in giant tanks known as bioreactors would cost between $5,200-$5,500 a ton (3,300 to 3,500 euros), which the analysis claims is cost competitive with European beef prices.

Full Story: Wired

(via Grinding)

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Connelly criticizes Ms. Gandhi, influential author Paul Ehrlich (”The Population Bomb”), and other thought leaders who agreed that only population control could save the world from poverty and other maladies. The 20th century marked the first time the future of a species – not only its numbers but also its nature – became the object of its own design, he writes. People eradicated diseases, regulated migration, and manipulated fertility rates. Human populations became the subject of scientific experiments and political struggles. The stakes – and the consequences – were huge.

Americans were the first to pursue policies to shape the world population and played a leading role in institutionalizing the science of demography and the political strategy of family planning. But critics on both the left and the right have attacked population control as something perpetrated by white, wealthy, elite people (especially in the United States), upon the rest of the world, particularly poor nations, where populations had been spiraling out of control.

[…]

But now that Asians have reduced their reproductive rate to 2.1 children, for example, there are other issues to consider. If they also have air conditioning and automobiles, they will have a much greater impact on the global ecosystem than a billion more subsistence farmers, he writes.

Full Story: Christian Science Monitor

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Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode sheets directly on the surface of the brain. Led by Osaka University Medical School neurosurgery professor Toshiki Yoshimine, the research marks Japan’s first foray into invasive (i.e. requiring open-skull surgery) brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the research is to develop real-time mind-controlled robotic limbs for the disabled, according to an announcement made at an April 16 symposium in Aichi prefecture.

Full Story: Pink Tentacle.

(via Grinding)

Those not wanting to cut open their skulls might want to take a look at the less intrusive Emotiv EPOC Neuroheadset, which will is scheduled to be available commercially by Christmas of 2008 for $299.

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“That guy has too much spare time” is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject’s passions — this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love — are so meritless that their specific shortcomings don’t even warrant discussion. The subtext is that any sane person who considers these passions will immediately see their total worthlessness. To direct this remark at someone is to utterly dismiss their personal fire and so their ability to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.

It’s a substitute for thought. It’s a uncompromising line between art and junk, between personal enrichment and navel-gazing. Whether it’s directed at some model-train otaku who has reproduced, in miniature, a fantastic landscape that she brings to life with the flick of a switch or an obsessive collector of breakfast cereal packaging whose house is wallpapered with gaudy enticements to tooth-decay, the slur brooks no possibility that the speaker has failed to appreciate some valuable, fulfilling element of the subject’s hobby.

Maybe this irks me so much because everything I care about is dismissed as a waste of time by most of world, or was, until recently: Science fiction, the Internet, blogging, gadgetry, vintage tchotchkes, Disney parks, etc. Really, is there anything fulfilling about life that didn’t start out on the fringes, didn’t start out as a waste of time? We love to trot out hoary chestnuts from history where some long-dead expert predicts the imminent demise of computers, or radios, or cars, or public transit, or bicycling, or television, or indoor plumbing, or microscopy, or the space program, but we never seem to notice that our modern world is full of similar dismissals of fun, fringey pass-times: robotic Lego, Versus MP3 mixes, TiVo, fanfic, blogging.

Full Story: Boing Boing.

Posted as a reminder to myself, as much as anything.

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via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing

New Scientist has a feature package where seventeen big name scientists recommend books that they considered "life-changing." Here is the list of the scientists and the books they suggest, with each title linking to Amazon. Follow the link at the bottom of the post to the New Scientist article where you can read the scientists’ thoughts on their picks. From New Scientist:

1. Farthest North - Steve Jones, geneticist
2. The Art of the Soluble - V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
3. Animal Liberation - Jane Goodall, primatologist
4. The Foundation trilogy - Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist
5. Alice in Wonderland - Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist
6. One, Two, Three… Infinity - Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
7. The Idea of a Social Science - Harry Collins, sociologist of science
8. Handbook of Mathematical Functions - Peter Atkins, chemist
9. The Mind of a Mnemonist - Oliver Sacks, neurologist
10. A Mathematician’s Apology - Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
11. The Leopard - Susan Greenfield, neurophysiologist
12. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior - Frans de Waal, psychologist and ethologist
13. Catch-22 / The First Three Minutes - Lawrence Krauss, physicist
14. William James, Writings 1878-1910 - Daniel Everett, linguist
15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Chris Frith, neuroscientist
16. The Naked Ape - Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
17. King Solomon’s Ring - Marion Stamp Dawkins, Zoologist

A few familiar titles, and I always like to recommend the writings of William James. I look forward to checking into the others!

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Shared misconceptions:

Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection
Natural selection is the only means of evolution
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment
Evolution always promotes the survival of species
It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution
“Survival of the fittest” justifies “everyone for themselves”
Evolution is limitlessly creative
Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality
Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Creationist myths:

Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant
Accepting evolution undermines morality
Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide
Religion and evolution are incompatible
Half a wing is no use to anyone
Evolutionary science is not predictive
Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science
Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms
Evolution is an entirely random process
Mutations can only destroy information, not create it
Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution
The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex
Yet more creationist misconceptions
Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics

Full Story: New Scientist.

(via Daily Grail)

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Crucial to make this transition more efficient is the development of crops that sequester more CO2 than normal plants. Such high-carbon plants withdraw the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and use it to grow more lignocellulose. When during their conversion into biohydrogen (or bio-electricity) more CO2 is captured and stored, it means they become more carbon-negative. The first crops with a higher CO2 storing capacity have meanwhile been developed: an eucalyptus tree that stores more CO2 and grows less ligning but more cellulose (previous post), and a hybrid larch that sequesters up to 30% more CO2 (earlier post).

Full Story: Biopact.

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Are you a feeble, pasty pansy? For the low price of $1000 a month, you could overcome your physical limitations with a HAL exoskeleton from Cyberdyne. While HAL prototypes have been around for a few years now, Cyberdyne has just begun building a lab that will mass produce 400-500 of the suits per year starting this October.

Full Story: Gizmodo.

(via Coilhouse)

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Sometime in the latter half of this century, human population will peak. Having swelled to a bit over nine billion people, our numbers will begin to drop as people age and women worldwide pass through the urban transition, gain control over their own life-choices and have fewer children.

After that, population will proceed to decline by the middle of the 22nd century to a number somewhere between 8.5 billion and 5.6 billion (depending it seems largely on whose assumptions about longevity growth you find most credible).

That’s pretty much the consensus position among demographers (though there is a range of belief about when the peak will happen and whether we can expect to more or less plateau at 8.5 billion or experience a long bumpy slope to a stable-state population of about 6 billion). Note that we don’t need to assume any sort of apocalypse here: this is the orderly progression of human beings passing through a post-industrial demographic threshold you can already see in cultures from Japan to Italy to Finland.

[…]

The standard response to these facts is that some new technology will “save” us, and make limits irrelevant. But I am consistently impressed, when I speak with folks who are hard at work in the fields of biotechnology, molecular engineering and software design, at how real a sense of limits actually exists among the smarter ones. There are things we don’t know how to do now and may never (in any foreseeable time span) know how to do; there are others that seem like good ideas until you start doing them and encounter the unintended consequences; there are still others that work, but work in ways that mean something different than we expected. Where in the 90s we expected emerging technologies to unleash the boundless, more contemporary thinking about these technologies seems to me to be all about seeing them not as magic but as tools: profoundly useful, if used right, but perhaps far less transformative than once we hoped. They may greatly extend the range of actions we can take within the fundamental limits we face, but they most likely won’t change the limits themselves.

Full Story: WorldChanging.

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He survived against all the odds; now Peng Shulin has astounded doctors by learning to walk again.

When his body was cut in two by a lorry in 1995, it was little short of a medical miracle that he lived.

Skin was grafted from his head to seal his torso – but the legless Mr Peng was left only 78cm (2ft 6in) tall.

[…]

Doctors at the China Rehabilitation Research Centre in Beijing found out about Mr Peng’s plight late last year and devised a plan to get him up walking again.

Full Story: Metro UK.

(via Lupa).

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Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday. He was 90.

He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the “butterfly effect.” He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.

His discovery of “deterministic chaos” brought about “one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. It was one of many scientific awards that Lorenz won. There is no Nobel Prize for his specific field of expertise, meteorology.

Full Story: Wired.

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5. Harvard Scientists Build a Device to Smoke Weed During a Brain Scan
4. Stanford Chemists make THC from Scratch
3. Researchers Learn How Salvia Works
2. British Army Tests LSD on Soldiers
1. Researchers Combine Chemicals from Sea Urchin Eggs and Weed to Make Powerful Painkillers

Full Story: Wired.

(Thanks Bill!)

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In January, Nature launched an informal survey into readers’ use of cognition-enhancing drugs. Brendan Maher has waded through the results and found large-scale use and a mix of attitudes towards the drugs.

[…]

One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Use did not differ greatly across age-groups (see line graph, right), which will surprise some. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in Bethesda, Maryland, says that household surveys suggest that stimulant use is highest in people aged 18–25 years, and in students.

Wish they’d asked about caffeine and other non-prescription stimulants as well.

Full Story: Nature.

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“For years, Russian scientists harvested the brains of exceptionally smart people, trying to locate the source of their intelligence. After V.I. Lenin died in 1924, for example, the Russians invited the great German neuroanatomist Oskar Vogt to try to locate the “source of genius” in the leader of the Russian revolution. Vogt cut Lenin’s brain into more than 1,100 slices, but he found nothing exceptional except unusually large pyramidal cells.

The last brain that the Russians studied in this way was that of Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and human rights activist who died in 1989. From the dozens of brains they studied, the researchers made many observations about brain size, the density of neurons and the number of convolutions of the cortex, but their findings revealed next to nothing about human intelligence.

Today, scientists around the world continue to search for the physiological basis of human intelligence, but they also focus on genetic variation, which appears to determine about half of a brain’s cognitive ability on average, as measured by standard IQ tests. And by using modern scanning techniques, they are gaining much more detailed insights into the structure and function of the brain than the Russians could achieve through dissection.”

(via The Dana Foundation)

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