The Devil Went Down to Woolsery

Now, I would like to say, here and now, that if I was standing on the outside looking in, I wouldn’t believe this story at all, and I would be convinced that those naughty rapscallions at the CFZ had got a little tipsy in The Farmers Arms last night, and were playing a joke upon the rest of the fortean omniverse.

But, speaking as one of the aforementioned rapscallions, I can assure you that I am not!

Just before ten this morning, when Graham was toddling about the place all on his lonesome (because Graham is the first of the CFZ posse to rise in the morning) the telephone rang, and – being a dutiful fellow – he answered it.

It was a local lady who wondered if we would like to go and have a look at some peculiar footprints in the snow in her garden. Graham finished his coffee, grabbed the cameras and set off. …

I am sure that you are all aware of the legend of the Devil’s hoofprints – an occasion in February 1855 when a series of prints of what appeared to be cloven hooves were found in the snow all across South Devon. The superstitious locals believed that they were the work of the Devil and that the hornèd one had paid a personal visit to the county.

Well I don’t believe that happened then, and I don’t believe that is what happened last night either. There is certainly a perfectly rational zoological explanation for both events but our investigations are at a very early stage. In must be stressed however, that there are no scuff marks in the snow as would happen if a person had walked, and although the marks could have been made by someone on stilts that is highly unlikely.

via CRYPTOZOOLOGY ONLINE: Still on the Track: WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD: The Devil Went Down to Woolsery.

Why Dreams Are So Difficult To Remember: Precise Communication Discovered Across Brain Areas During Sleep

By listening in on the chatter between neurons in various parts of the brain, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have taken steps toward fully understanding just how memories are formed, transferred, and ultimately stored in the brain–and how that process varies throughout the various stages of sleep.

… during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, the previously chatty neuron pairs seemed to talk right past each other, firing at the same rates as before but no longer in concert.

“It was surprising,” says Wierzynski, “to find that the timing relationship almost completely went away during REM sleep.”

Since REM sleep is the phase during which dreaming occurs, the scientists speculate that this absence of memory-consolidating chatter may eventually help to explain why dreams can be so difficult to remember.

via Why Dreams Are So Difficult To Remember: Precise Communication Discovered Across Brain Areas During Sleep.

Our mental models are disconnected from most body feedback during dreams, so pairs no longer being in sync during REM sleep  makes sense.  Dreams may simply be the byproduct of long term memory consolidation. This is why events from your day show up in your dreams.  Memory is also state specific. It is adaptive to not remember one’s dreams too much.

Humans Can Sense ‘Smell Of Fear’ In Sweat, Psychologist Says

When threatened, many animals release chemicals as a warning signal to members of their own species, who in turn react to the signals and take action. Research by Rice University psychologist Denise Chen suggests a similar phenomenon occurs in humans. …

Exposure to the smell of fear biased women toward interpreting facial expressions as more fearful, but only when the expressions were ambiguous. It had no effect when the facial emotions were more discernable.

Chen’s conclusion is consistent with what’s been found with processing emotions in both the face and the voice. There, an emotion from one sense modulates how the same emotion is perceived in another sense, especially when the signal to the latter sense is ambiguous.

“Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that human sweat contains emotional meanings,” Chen said. “They also demonstrate that social smells modulate vision in an emotion-specific way.”

Smell is a prevalent form of social communication in many animals, but its function in humans is enigmatic. Humans have highly developed senses of sight and hearing. Why do we still need olfaction? Findings by Chen and Zhou offer insight on this topic. “The sense of smell guides our social perception when the more-dominant senses are weak,” Chen said.

via Humans Can Sense ‘Smell Of Fear’ In Sweat, Psychologist Says.

Study: Belligerent chimp proves animals make plans

A canny chimpanzee who calmly collected a stash of rocks and then hurled them at zoo visitors in fits of rage has confirmed that apes can plan ahead just like humans, a Swedish study said Monday. Santino the chimpanzee’s anti-social behavior stunned both visitors and keepers at the Furuvik Zoo but fascinated researchers because it was so carefully prepared.

According to a report in the journal Current Biology, the 31-year-old alpha male started building his weapons cache in the morning before the zoo opened, collecting rocks and knocking out disks from concrete boulders inside his enclosure. He waited until around midday before he unleashed a “hailstorm” of rocks against visitors, the study said.

“These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way,” said the author of the report, Lund University Ph.D. student Mathias Osvath. “It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events.”

Osvath’s findings were based on his own observations of Santino and interviews with three senior caretakers who had followed the chimpanzee’s behavior for 10 years at the zoo in Furuvik, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) north of Stockholm.

Seemingly at ease with his position as leader of the group, Santino didn’t attack the other chimpanzees, Osvath told The Associated Press. The attacks were only directed at humans viewing the apes across the moat surrounding the island compound where they were held.

However, he rarely hit visitors because of his poor aim, and no one was seriously injured in the cases when he did, Osvath said.

The observations confirmed the result of a staged laboratory experiment reported in 2006 by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In that case orangutans and bonobos were able to figure out which tool would work in an effort to retrieve grapes, and were able to remember to bring that tool along hours later.

“Every time you can combine experimental and observational data and you get a consistent result, that is very powerful,” said an author of the 2006 study, Joseph Call. “This is an important observation.” … “It could be that he is a genius, only more research will tell. On the other hand our research showed the same in orangutans and bonobos so he is not alone,” Call said.

via Study: Belligerent chimp proves animals make plans – Yahoo! News.

Shakespeare Scholar Identifies True Portrait of the Bard

We all know what William Shakespeare looked like: similar to a hippie uncle — balding, moustached, longish hair in back. How do we know? Mostly from an engraving by Martin Droeshout that appeared with the First Folio, the collection of Shakespeare’s work that was published in 1623, seven years after his death. That engraving is reproduced with almost every edition of Shakespeare that offers a picture of him.

…The painting has languished for centuries outside Dublin at Newbridge House, home base of the Cobbe family, where until recently no one suspected it might be a portrait of the Bard. Three years ago, Alec Cobbe, who had inherited much of the collection in the 1980s and placed it in trust, found himself at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London called “Searching for Shakespeare.” There he saw a painting from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., that had been accepted until the late 1930s as a portrait of Shakespeare from life. Looking at it, Cobbe felt certain the Folger painting was a copy of the one in his family’s collection. He asked Wells, an old friend, for his help in authenticating it.

via Shakespeare Scholar Identifies True Portrait of the Bard – TIME.

Follow up: Painting that was Sir Walter Raleigh then William Shakespeare is now Sir Thomas Overbury.

Shakespeare Unfound(ed)? The real identity of the sitter for the new “Shakespeare” portrait

The “Cobbe” portrait is a splendid painting, whose sparkling colours have benefited from recent restoration. The italic inscription at the top of the picture, “Principum Amicitias!” – “the leagues of princes!” – appears too large in scale, as well as highly unusual in its deployment of an exclamation mark, and was perhaps added later. The “Shakespeare” claim does not rely crucially on the authenticity of this motto from Horace’s Odes, II.i, though the authors of the brochure remark that “it can be no coincidence that Horace’s words were addressed to a playwright”. It might have been helpful to examine the picture’s reverse for further inscriptions or telling marks, but at the preview the back was veiled with a brown paper screen. But the man portrayed, with his elaborate lace collar and gold embroidered doublet, appears far too grand and courtier-like to be Shakespeare. Though a leading “King’s Man”, Shakespeare was no nobleman, and even his status as “gentleman” was repeatedly called in question by some of the heralds. (As John Davies of Hereford records, both Shakespeare and Burbage hoped for further preferment from James I, but didn’t get it.) When players dressed above their rank offstage, it tended to get them into trouble. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have been rash enough to permit himself to be portrayed in such grand array. – timesonline

Vatican-backed conference snubs creationism

A Vatican-backed conference on evolution is under attack from people who weren’t invited to participate: those espousing creationism and intelligent design.

The Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, says it was shut out from presenting its views because the meeting was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, a major U.S. nonprofit that has criticized the intelligent design movement.

Intelligent design holds that certain features of life forms are so complex that they can best be explained by an origin from an intelligent higher power, not an undirected process like natural selection.

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Organizers of the five-day conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University said Thursday that they barred intelligent design proponents because they wanted an intellectually rigorous conference on science, theology and philosophy to mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”

While there are some Darwinian dissenters present, intelligent design didn’t fit the bill, they said.

“We think that it’s not a scientific perspective, nor a theological or philosophical one,” said the Rev. Marc Leclerc, the conference director and a professor of philosophy of nature at the Gregorian. “This makes a dialogue very difficult, maybe impossible.”

via Vatican-backed conference snubs creationism – Science- msnbc.com.

Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries by Mike Adams the Health Ranger

I was sick for the entire month of January.  I have never been sick that long with a virus in my life. Now that I think of it, I had all the symptoms of bird flu: fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches and conjunctivitis … but Bird flu has not reached California yet. And besides, while I may have had pneumonia, I never had  breathing difficulties.   I recovered fully for a month … but then  had the flu return in March along with a sinus infection. Time to sterilize everything, replace all the toothbrushes, etc.

Someone asked me if I’ve tried the flu vaccine. No, I have not, and things like the  rather provocative article on naturalnews.com below lead me to be less than trusting at the current time.  ( Seasonal influenza vaccine will not protect you from bird flu, by the way. )

There’s a popular medical thriller novel in which a global pandemic is intentionally set off by an evil plot designed to reduce the human population. In the book, a nefarious drug company inserts live avian flu viruses into vaccine materials that are distributed to countries around the world to be injected into patients as “flu shots.” Those patients then become carriers for these highly-virulent strains of avian flu which go on to infect the world population and cause widespread death.

There’s only one problem with this story: It’s not fiction. Or, at least, the part about live avian flu viruses being inserted into vaccine materials isn’t fiction. It’s happening right now.

Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The “mistake” (if you can call it that, see below…) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?

As published on LifeGen.de (http://www.lifegen.de/newsip/showne…), serious questions like this are being raised:

“Baxter International Inc. in Austria ‘unintentionally contaminated samples with the bird flu virus that were used in laboratories in 3 neighbouring countries, raising concern about the potential spread of the deadly disease’. Austria, Germany, Slowenia and the Czech Republic – these are the countries in which labs were hit with dangerous viruses. Not by bioterrorist commandos, but by Baxter. In other words: One of the major global pharmaceutical players seems to have lost control over a virus which is considered by many virologists to be one of the components leading some day to a new pandemic.”

Or, put another way, Baxter is acting a whole lot like a biological terrorism organization these days, sending deadly viral samples around the world. If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your Senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter — which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world — getting away with saying, essentially, “Oops?”

But there’s a bigger question in all this: How could this company have accidentally mixed LIVE avian flu viruses (both H5N1 and H3N2, the human form) in this vaccine material?

Was the viral contamination intentional?

The shocking answer is that this couldn’t have been an accident. Why? Because Baxter International adheres to something called BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) – a set of laboratory safety protocols that prevent the cross-contamination of materials.

As explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosaf…):

“Laboratory personnel have specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and are supervised by competent scientists who are experienced in working with these agents. This is considered a neutral or warm zone. All procedures involving the manipulation of infectious materials are conducted within biological safety cabinets or other physical containment devices, or by personnel wearing appropriate personal protective clothing and equipment. The laboratory has special engineering and design features.”

via Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries by Mike Adams the Health Ranger.

The Lifegen.de  article says:

“There is no excuse. According to the scientific network PROMED, Baxter International Inc. in Austria “unintentionally contaminated samples with the bird flu virus that were used in laboratories in 3 neighbouring countries, raising concern about the potential spread of the deadly disease”. Austria, Germany, Slowenia and the Czech Republic – these are the countries in which labs were hit with dangerous viruses. Not by bioterrorist commandos, but by Baxter. In other words: One of the major global pharmaceutical players seems to have lost control over a virus which is considered by many virologists to be one of the components leading some day to a new pandemic. Was it H5N1, or the even more risky H3N2? And what about the BSL3-Standards Baxter is operating when handling the viruses? What happened? And who failed?”

The avian flu seems to be working up to be a real human menace.

… according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A new University of Colorado at Boulder study showed the resistance of the avian flu virus to a major class of antiviral drugs “is increasing through positive evolutionary selection, with researchers documenting the trend in more than 30 percent of the samples tested”, as the scientists report. Even if the expected influenza pandemic did not start yet, there is no doubt about the comeback of the lethal virus: The first Pandemic Influenza occurred in three waves in the United States – exactly 90 years ago, between 1918 and 1919.

A google article from the Canadian press says:

Baxter admits contaminated seasonal flu product contained live bird flu virus

The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses. And an official of the World Health Organization’s European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International’s research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.

“At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present,” medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark. “But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau.”

The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany. The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.

Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on Baxter’s part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live. But the company, Baxter International Inc., has been parsimonious about the amount of information it has released about the event.

On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.

“It was live,” Christopher Bona said in an email.

The contaminated product, which Baxter calls “experimental virus material,” was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine – including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly – at a facility in the Czech Republic.

People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted. …

David Byrne, “People Tree” from NASA dir. Syd Garon + Johannes Gamble

This new music video from David Byrne of the Talking Heads seems inspired by the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.

Google Docs suffers privacy glitch

Google discovered a privacy glitch that inappropriately shared access to a small fraction of word-processing and presentation documents stored on the company’s online Google Docs service.

“We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document,” the company said in a note, quoted at TechCrunch, that the search giant sent to affected people. “The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

Google said in a later statement that the problem affected only 0.05 percent of documents stored at the site and that affected Google Docs users had been notified.

Though the documents were shared only with people whom the Google Docs users had already shared documents, rather than with the world at large, the problem illustrates one downside of cloud computing, in which Internet servers host software previously run on a person’s own computer. The flip side of a cloud-computing advantage, that a person can get access to those documents from any Internet-connected computer or smartphone, is that technical problems or hacking attempts also can expose private information.

- via Cnet.com

The secret of long life? It’s all down to how fast you react

People’s reaction times are a far better indicator of their chances of living a long life than their blood pressure, exercise levels or weight, researchers have discovered.

Men and women with the most sluggish response times are more than twice as likely to die prematurely.

Edinburgh University and the Medical Research Council in Glasgow tracked 7,414 people nationwide over 20 years in a study which appears to confirm the adage that a healthy mind means a healthy body.

The researchers suggest that people’s reaction times are a measure of their intelligence, which in turn is an indicator of their body’s ‘system integrity’ – how well it is wired together.

They said:‘Our results suggest that ‘choice’ reaction time, a moderately high correlate of intelligence, is an important risk factor for death from all causes, including cardiovascular disease.’

The study, published in the respected journal Intelligence this week, is the first to look at reaction times and mortality, comparing the results with known risk factors like smoking and drinking.

The authors say there is growing evidence that people with higher IQs tend to live longer and healthier lives.

While this can partly be put down to differences in lifestyles because more intelligent people are less likely to smoke and be overweight, much of the gap has previously been unexplained. …

via The secret of long life? It’s all down to how fast you react | Mail Online.

Here is some information on the Ruler Drop Test. The link includes a form you can use to calculate your reaction time.

How to conduct the test

The ruler is held by the assistant between the outstretched index finger and thumb of the athlete’s dominant hand, so that the top of the athlete’s thumb is level with the zero centimetre line on the ruler. The assistant instructs the athlete to catch the ruler as soon as possible after it has been released.

The assistant is to record distance between the bottom of the ruler and the top of the athlete’s thumb where the ruler has been caught. …

Normative data for the Ruler Drop Test

The following are national norms for 16 to 19 year olds.

Excellent	Above Average	Average	Below Average	Poor
<7.5cm	7.5 – 15.9cm	15.9 – 20.4cm	20.4 – 28cm	>28cm

Table Reference: Davis B. et al; Physical Education and the Study of Sport; 2000