elbizri.com

Listening to music releases the same “feelgood” chemicals as eating and having sex, researchers have found.The neuroscientist and former rock music producer Prof Daniel Levitin said music activates the brain area responsible for feeling pleasure, excitement and satisfaction.

A woman listening to music, music vibes as good as sex and food
Research shows that music has specific effects on the body’s physiology

Prof Levitin, an associate professor of psychology at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests that understanding how different types of music affects the body can help people choose songs or bands that could help them achieve tasks or goals.

He found the brain of someone listening to music reacts in a similar way to that of a gambler when winning a bet, a skydiver about to leap out of a plane or someone who has just taken drugs.

Music vibes as good as sex and food – Telegraph

Over the next few years, some experiments hold out a chance of finally being able to show whether or not time can move backward as well as forward. Theoretically, at least, it might be possible for the future to influence the past, said John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington. He and his colleagues plan to try just such an experiment next year.

1. Take this with a grain of salt. It’s MSNBC after all.
2. The article is peppered with movie references. Really great science reporting there. No w could one of the writers explain to me – were you really dumbing down and confusing things for your readers, or yourself?
3. What’s more, not a single reference to a Delorean.
Time-travel physics: Stranger than fiction – Mysteries of the Universe – MSNBC.com

Vocal communication involves caterwauls for mating, chattering upon spotting prey, hissing to ward off an intruder, or shrieking when hurt or terrified. Meowing is not part of this language. Meow-ese, it would seem, is a language developed exclusively for humans.

How fascinating! The article goes on to discuss research into this inter-species communication, and how cat owners are better at understanding the emotion being conveyed by a particular caterwaul.

Very interesting, even if completely obvious when you think about it.
petcentric: Your Bi-Lingual Kitty

Cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok have a radical idea… They theorize that the cosmos was never compacted into a single point and did not spring forth in a violent instant. Instead, the universe as we know it is a small cross section of a much grander universe whose true magnitude is hidden in dimensions we cannot perceive. What we think of as the Big Bang, they contend, was the result of a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world less than the width of a proton away from ours—right next to us, and yet displaced in a way that renders it invisible. Moreover, they say the Big Bang is just the latest in a cycle of cosmic collisions stretching infinitely into the past and into the future. Each collision creates the universe anew. The 13.7-billion-year history of our cosmos is just a moment in this endless expanse of time.

String theory. A theory that has no experimental implications. It makes for exciting articles, sure. But I think they would have been better calling it rope theory.
Before the Big Bang

Some years ago scientists at CALTECH California Institute of Technology in Pasadena discovered that humans possess a tiny, shiny crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone, located between your eyes, just behind the nose.

It seems that magnetite helps direction finding in animals and helps migratory species migrate successfully by allowing them to draw upon the earths magnetic fields. But scientists are not sure how they do this.

The funny thing is that I have often get a strange tingling sensation in that area. Usually when I am lying in bed after a night out on the town (or out on the living room, more often these days 😐 ).

Of course, just because this exists, doesn’t mean we actually use it for anything. Or maybe we’ve forgotten how, since we don’t need it. There isn’t much of a reason to assume that this isn’t vestigial, or is it?

The biggest question asked by this finding however, is how can I learn to use it to find where I parked my car?

Do humans have a compass in their nose?

Every one of us carries about 100,000 virurses, embedded in our genes. Scary…

Every day, viruses traffic in and out of human bodies. They invade people’s cells, make new copies of themselves, and then, if they’re lucky, infect a new host. Some viruses do this by stapling themselves into our DNA, so that their own genes are read by our cells much as they read their own genes. In many cases, infected cells die as they manufacture hundreds of new viruses that burst out of them. But in some cases the viruses get stuck. They sit in the cell’s genome, and the cell goes on living. When the cell duplicates, it duplicates the virus DNA as well. Just because the virus spares the cell is not necessarily a good thing. The virus may still be able to pop out of dormancy and wreak havoc. It may also trigger its host cell to duplicate like mad–giving rise to cancer. One in five cancers is associated with these viruses.

The Loom : The Sixty-Million-Year Virus

In a paper published in the November 27th issue of PLoS Genetics, a research team led by scientists at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) report the determination and analysis of the complete genome sequence of this organism. Isolated from a hot spring on the Russian volcanic island of Kunashir, this microbe lives almost entirely on carbon monoxide. While consuming this normally poisonous gas, the microbe mixes it with water, producing hydrogen gas as waste.

Welcome to the future.

A random google search turned up this discussion. Is this news? Apparently, at least one person has been performing experiments, to genetically modifying marijuana.

I have started a new identity here on OG to give you guys a heads up to the research I am doing.

Genetic modifications are become very common. Since cannabis is an illegal substance, it is not getting the attention that it should. There is research and development being carried out, but it is not to the end that will benifit the recreational user. These studys are however serving as reference for my work

There are two really interesting things going about this. The first is that someone is that genetic modification has become so easy and commonplace that some educated and well situated people are in the position to do some of their own, purely for there own entertainment.

The second is that perhaps a little less obvious, and that is that information and knowledge is idly being transfered and dissected on a web bulletin board. I’ve seen similar things going on in other forums, but geneticly modifying plants? What’s next?

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