Does the Earth’s magnetic field cause suicides?

Many animals can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, so why not people, asks Oleg Shumilov of the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia.

Shumilov looked at activity in the Earth’s geomagnetic field from 1948 to 1997 and found that it grouped into three seasonal peaks every year: one from March to May, another in July and the last in October.

Surprisingly, he also found that the geomagnetism peaks matched up with peaks in the number of suicides in the northern Russian city of Kirovsk over the same period.

Shumilov acknowledges that a correlation like this does not necessarily mean there is a causal link, but he points out that there have been several other studies suggesting a link between human health and geomagnetism.

Woman Fights To Keep Nearly 150 Cats At Home

A Central Florida woman fined $150 a day for having nearly 150 cats at her home was in court Wednesday fighting to keep the animals in her so-called animal sanctuary. Kristy Grant has cared for the cats at her home in Volusia County despite being cited and complaints from her neighbors. The county fined Grant $6,700 for unlicensed cats and $150 a day since March for having the cats, Local 6 reported.

“It is frustrating, it is nerve-racking,” Grant said. “It has been a long two years since I was first cited for having more than four pets on my property.”Wednesday, Grant’s attorney said Volusia County is in the dark when it comes to rules for cat hobbyist.Grant said she has recently installed a fence to keep her neighbors happy.”I guarantee that the cats can’t get out,” Grant said.During a hearing, Volusia County’s attorney said rules for keeping cats on property have not been defined, Local 6’s Chris Trenkmann said.Grant said she hopes she is not the target for a new ordinance.”Yes, that upsets me,” Grant said. “I don’t want to prevent anyone from doing what I do. If you want to help an animal, you should.”A judge said Wednesday that he will make a ruling on case at a later date.However, he pointed out to Volusia County that it did not make sense for them to be determining rules about giving permits for cat sanctuaries if they haven’t written any rules out, Trenkmann said.Grant said she has the right to have a permit to keep her cats safe. - local6

Girl’s suicide leaves dozens ill from fumes

A 14-year-old Japanese girl killed herself by mixing laundry detergent with cleanser, releasing fumes that also sickened 90 people in her apartment house, police said Thursday as they grappled with a spate of similar suicides.

None of the sickened neighbors in Konan, southern Japan, was severely ill, although about 10 were hospitalized, authorities said. The deadly hydrogen sulfide gas escaped from the girl’s bathroom window and entered neighboring apartments.

The girl’s suicide Wednesday night was part of an expanding string of similar deaths that experts say have been encouraged by Internet suicide sites since last summer.

A 31-year-old man outside Tokyo killed himself inside a car early Thursday by mixing detergent and bath salts, police said.

These gas mask people are one of the last things you’d want to see walking up to your house.

Church custodian on trial in Italy for weeping statue hoax

Rome, Apr 23, 2008 / 06:36 am (CNA).- A former church custodian accused of faking an incident where a Virgin Mary statue wept blood was put on trial in the northern Italian city of Forli’ on Friday, ANSA reports.

Police accuse Vincenzo Di Costanzo of dripping his own blood onto the face of the statue in Forli’s Santa Lucia Church in a March 2006 attempt to simulate a miracle.

Forensic experts who examined the blood found the DNA matched that of a saliva sample taken from Di Costanzo.

“This is a case of high sacrilege,” said the public prosecutor Alessandro Mancini, according to ANSA.

Bill C-51 will

Via email from “David with Canadian Rights and Freedoms Advocates”. Two of the links in the email were bad, but the link to the bill is real. I haven’t had time to read the bill to see if it seems to really do what is claimed below.

Bill C-51 will:

* Remove democratic oversight, bypassing elected officials to vote in laws and allow bureaucrats to adopt laws from other countries without our consent.

* Remove 70% of Natural Health Products from Canadians and many others will be available by prescription only.

* Restrict research and development of safe natural alternatives in favor of high risk drugs.

* Punish Canadians with little or no opportunity for protection or recourse for simply speaking about or giving a natural product without the approval of government. More than 70% of people in Canada use a Natural Health Product. The new law goes so far as to warrant action against a person who would give another person an unapproved amount of garlic on the recommendation that it would improve that personâ’s health.

Proposed New Enforcement Powers:

* Inspectors will enter private property without a warrant

* Inspectors will take your property at their discretion

* Inspectors will dispose of your property at will

* Inspectors will not reimburse you for your losses

* Inspectors will seize your bank accounts

* Inspectors will charge owners shipping and storage charges for seized property

* Inspectors will be empowered to store your property indefinitely

* Inspectors will levy fines of up to $5,000,000.00 and/or seek 2 years in jail per incident

With your assets and money under their control will you be able to defend yourself in Court?

Can you trust government with this new law and enforcement power?

Would our government really ever turn this law against us? Read the following account.

A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity

Image of a migraine by Anne Adams, who was drawn to structure and repetition. She had a rare disease that changes connections between parts of the brain.

If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for “The Twilight Zone,” odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last year.

Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school.

video of telepathic dog experiment | Dogs That Know

There may be something going on, but this particular experiment as explained in the video doesn’t show any dog mind reading.. “Interpretation after the fact” is a major flaw which leads over and over to our own self deception. In other words, we add meaning where there is none without realizing that we are doing so. In other words, how do we know the observers of this experiment, who watched the dog after they knew when the owner was coming home, didn’t just pick the one of many behaviors the dog did on camera that matched the time the woman was heading home?

from www.dogsthatknow.com posted with vodpod

Brazil priest carried aloft by balloons missing

A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil. Rescuers in helicopters and small fishing boats were searching off the coast of Santa Catarina state, where pieces of balloons were found.

Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli lifted off from the port city of Paranagua on Sunday afternoon, wearing a helmet, thermal suit and a parachute. He was reported missing about eight hours later after losing contact with port authority officials, according to the treasurer of his Sao Cristovao parish, Denise Gallas.

Gallas said by telephone that the priest wanted to break a 19-hour record for the most hours flying with balloons to raise money for a spiritual rest-stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products.

Some American adventurers have used helium balloons to emulate Larry Walters — who in 1982 rose three miles above Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by balloons.

A video of Carli posted on the G1 Web site of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.

According to Gallas, the priest soared to an altitude of 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) then descended to about 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) for his planned flight to the city of Dourados, 465 miles (750 kilometers) northwest of his parish. But winds pushed him in another direction, and Carli was some 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast when he last contacted Paranagua’s port authority, Gallas said.

Carli had a GPS device, a satellite phone, a buoyant chair and is an experienced skydiver, Gallas said. “We are absolutely confident he will be found alive and well, floating somewhere in the ocean,” she said. “He knew what he was doing and was fully prepared for any kind of mishap.” - msnbc

Bionic eye ‘blindness cure hope’

A ‘bionic eye’ may hold the key to returning sight to people left blind by a hereditary disease, experts believe.

A team at London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital have carried out the treatment on the UK’s first patients as part of a clinical study into the therapy.

The artificial eye, connected to a camera on a pair of glasses, has been developed by US firm Second Sight.

It said the technique may be able to restore a basic level of vision, but experts warned it was still early days.  The trial aims to help people who have been made blind through retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited eye diseases that affects the retina. The disease progresses over a number of years, normally after people have been diagnosed when they are children.

It is estimated between 20,000 to 25,000 are affected in the UK.

It is not known whether the treatment has helped the two patients - both men in their fifties - to see and any success is only likely to be in the form of light and dark outlines, but doctors are optimistic. Lyndon da Cruz, the eye surgeon who carried out the operations last week, said the treatment was “exciting”. “The devices were implanted successfully in both patients and they are recovering well from the operations.”

Other patients across Europe and the US have also been involved in the trial. The bionic eye, known as Argus II, works via the camera which transmits a wireless signal to an ultra-thin electronic receiver and electrode panel that are implanted in the eye and attached to the retina. The electrodes stimulate the remaining retinal nerves allowing a signal to be passed along the optic nerve to the brain. David Head, chief executive of the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, said: “This treatment is very exciting, but it is still early days.

“There is currently no treatment for patients so this device and research into stem cells therapies offers the best hope.” - bbc

Ten weirdest computers

Today’s computers use pulses of electricity and flipping magnets to manipulate and store data. But information can be processed in many other, weirder, ways…

1. Optical computing

There’s nothing weird about encoding data in light – global communications depend on optical fibre. But using light signals to actually process data and carry out computations is still not practical.

Optical computers are a worthwhile goal because using light could increase a computer’s speed and the quantity of data it can handle. But trapping, storing and manipulating light is difficult.

Research by people like Paul Braun, at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, US, is bringing us closer to this goal. He has created 3D optical waveguides out of photonic crystals that should make possible to trap light, slow it down and bend it around sharp corners, without fear of it escaping.

Meanwhile Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University has developed what is essentially an optical version of the transistor that underlies all today’s computing power. Lukin and colleagues have created a way to make a single photon from one light signal switch another light signal on and off.

2. Quantum computing

If you want to tear up all the rules of classical computing, look no further than quantum computers. Instead of using electronic bits of information that exist in either 1 or 0 states, they use quantum mechanical effects to create qubits that can be in both states at once.

Calculations show that this ability allows many parallel computations to be carried out. As the number of qubits a quantum computer increases, the data it can process increases exponentially.

That would make possible things that are unfeasible with today’s computers – such as rapidly factoring extremely large numbers to crack cryptographic keys.

However, quantum computers so far have only had very small numbers of qubits using quantum dots, nuclear magnetic resonance, metal ions, and, more recently entangled pairs of photons.

3. DNA computing

DNA may be the perfect material for carrying out computations. In a sense that is precisely what it evolved to do: DNA processes data and runs programs stored in sequences of genomic base pairs, as well as coordinating proteins that process information themselves to keep organisms alive.