Despite the message from WordPress yesterday saying this blog was suspended due to a violation of the terms of service, as happened four months ago, the message and suspension was an error.
What actually happened is an automated system that detects links to black-listed web sites was triggered to shut me down. I’m not sure if the link was in a comment or a post, but anyway, the situation if fixed. Onward. If you enjoy this site, bookmark my original site, www.xenophilia.com, which I’ll use to redirect you to my new blog in the event that something happens to this one.
T-Mobile’s Royal Wedding Dance celebrates the marriage of William and Kate with the help of a host of royal look alikes and music from East 17! T-Mobile wishes William and Kate a long and happy marriage.
“My goal is not to convince, my goal is to open minds,”said Jeff Meldrum, professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University. Meldrum has been researching the specimen of Sasquatch for more than 15 years and has received national attention for his work, both positive and negative.
His research examines various evidences which suggest that the mythical creature Sasquatch may in fact be real. In particular, he hypothesizes there may be not only one creature living today, but as many as 500-750 of the Sasquatch species.
“People have been so conditioned that this isn’t possible that when they finally see it, it upsets their whole equilibrium,” he said.
Meldrum said many people, both inside and outside of academia, don’t believe that Sasquatch could be real.
“Some of the naysayers adapt that position because such a creature, such a species could not exist under our noses and not have been discovered,” he said.
Others, he said, don’t accept the possibility out of stubbornness. …
Since no evidence is revealed in this article, it should have been titled, “Expert believes there may be up to 700 living Sasquatches”. If, for example, a timeline and map showing where different modern sightings have been supports a population of 700, then that would be evidence. So what is the evidence supporting this belief?
Ralph Gardner – … I met Alexander Imich at a party where he was the oldest person in the room. That may not sound like a big deal—more and more frequently these days I attend events where I am the oldest person. But the party where I met Dr. Imich was for people over the age of 100, and there were a couple dozen of them.
Dr. Imich, a chemist born in 1903, and I had a brief conversation at the Queens event. I vowed to see him again, and not because he was ancient, or at least not just because he was ancient. My grandmother lived to almost 105, but she was just a shadow of herself after 100. Dr. Imich, on the other hand, remains a dynamo. But it was his interests that most intrigued me. At the party, he regaled me with tales of paranormal events he claimed he’d witnessed—at his West End Avenue apartment, no less.
I don’t believe in parapsychology or UFOs, another of the centenarian’s interests, but I was impressed with his passion on the subject and his claim to have published dozens of scholarly papers in several languages. So I asked Arthur Solomon, the gentleman who had invited me to the party back in October, whether he could reconnect me with Dr. Imich (the honorific from a Ph.D. he earned in zoology in 1929).
Mr. Solomon checked and reported that unfortunately Dr. Imich had entered the hospital with some unspecified ailment. A couple of months later, Mr. Solomon contacted me. “I bet you never expected to hear from me again,” his email began. “But here I am with news about Dr. Imich. I was told he is feeling better and would like to do the interview.”
So on Monday afternoon I visited him at his apartment at the Esplanade, a senior-citizens residence on West End Avenue. He has lived there 50 years, actually since before it became a senior residence and was a hotel, according to Robin Kaufman, his social worker.
If there were any doubts about Dr. Imich’s mental acuity, he dispelled them within seconds of our arrival at his cluttered one-bedroom apartment with excellent views of the Hudson River. He complimented Natalie Keyssar, our photographer (“You’re beautiful,” he said); commented that he wasn’t aware that The Wall Street Journal ran photographs; and then patiently spelled out the name of the Polish city where he was born, Czestochowa, launching into its history. …
Occasionally Dr. Imich would lapse into silence—only for a few seconds—and I’d wonder whether it was a sign of senility, or at least flagging stamina. But that wasn’t it, because his next recollection, or retrieval of a name or date from the distant past, was just as confident, his voice just as robust, as anything that he’d said previously ….
But on to the paranormal, though Dr. Imich doesn’t claim to possess such powers himself. He produced bottles filled with objects such as bottle caps and plastic utensils that couldn’t have fit through their holes. He also told the story of the time he heard an explosion in his apartment and discovered a visitor, whose arrival he’d been awaiting at his front door, seated on the floor behind him. He also believes in UFOs and has a photograph on his desk of friends he says were abducted by aliens. Finally, he believes that humans can survive largely without food, and attributes his longevity, at least in part, to how little he eats.
Whether he’s right about any or all these things scarcely matters. “I’ve never seen Alex tired,” said Ms. Kaufman, who works for Selfhelp, a support organization for Holocaust survivors. “All that stuff he was talking about keeps him going.”
Awesome. But it would be nice to hear what Dr. Imich actually said about UFOs. I don’t understand how someone can get to the point where he is writing for the WSJ, and yet is able to get away with saying he does not believe that some flying objects are unidentified.
“I don’t believe in parapsychology or UFOs”.
Why, then, write an article titled “A Secret to Long Life: UFOs”?
Saying you “don’t believe in UFOs” is a bone headed statement. So, do you believe in … “objects”? Do you believe some objects fly, float, reflect, or otherwise appear to be in the sky? Okay, last question: Do you believe some objects that appear to be in the sky are unidentified? If you answered YES to all three, then you DO believe in UFOs, so stop lying. If you do not believe some flying objects are unidentified, then kindly explain exactly what was picked up by forward looking infrared radar by the Mexican military, for starters.
And, Ralph, parapsychology is a field of study. It really exists! Do you understand what I’m saying? The field of study, parapsychology, exists. I think you intended to say that you believe people are mistaken who believe in ghosts, life after death, telekinesis, telepathy, regression memories, out of body experiences, and anything else parapsychologists research. I guess your way of saying it is shorter.
Our most traumatic memories could be erased, thanks to the marine snail
Alasdair Wilkins — Although the idea of erasing your memories may sound horrific, there may be nothing better for those dealing with severe trauma. Now we’re one step closer to making it a reality, with a little help from the tiny marine snail.
UCLA researcher David Glanzman led the study, which discovered that it’s possible to erase long-term memories in snails by inhibiting a specific protein kinase known as PKM. While researchers have previously made headway with memory-erasing drugs, this new work focuses on the actual neurons of the brain, potentially allowing far finer control over the memory erasure process. If the methods used here could be adapted to humans, Glanzman hopes it could be used to help treat severe post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and possible long-term memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
Glanzman explains how it all works:
“Almost all the processes that are involved in memory in the snail also have been shown to be involved in memory in the brains of mammals. We found that if we inhibit PKM in the marine snail, we will erase the memory for long-term sensitization. In addition, we can erase the long-term change at a single synapse that underlies long-term memory in the snail.”
Many negative behaviors, I think, can be attributed to bad memories. You can reprogram your bad memories, because the way memory works, you only remember the last time you remembered something. You don’t remember the actual event. You rebuild your memories every time you remember them.
Reprogramming takes time … although if you do it in lucid dreams, you might reclaim the lost 1/3rd of your life as well as making your waking life better. I’d like to be able to get into my head and switch off a few things, make it as if they never happened. … with the option to switch them back on later.
Here’s how. Step 1: Start having lucid dreams. Step 2: Meditate and cultivate your objective observer. Step 3: Observe your dream as you dream. If fun stuff happens, enjoy it. If anything bad happens, take the opportunity to solve the problem. It’s your world in the dream, so create a solution and see how it feels.
When you get into your car, for the daily commute or for a relaxing weekend visit to a friend house you give off energy. Not just the energy from the fossil fuels that you burn, but a different kind of energy, vibrational energy. Most of us do not give that energy a second thought, unless we’re trying to do something that requires fine motor skills, such as putting the lid back onto your slightly deformed cup of scalding hot coffee, but it is there.
It is also a potential source of a green, and renewable energy. California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, a democrat from the Burbank district, hopes to help his home state to use it effectively. He has put in motion a legislation proposing that, if it passes, would create a pilot program designed to capture those vibrations.
The system, if implemented, would place sensors under a stretch of California roads. These sensors would be able to collect the vibrations caused by traffic and covert them into power. This system, know as piezoelectric generation, has the potential to add significantly to the power supply, if the system were implemented on a larger scale. A potential test patch, a one mile stretch of a two lane highway, would be able to create enough new electricity to power roughly 500 homes for an entire year, or give juice to 120 electrical vehicles each day. Not to mention the powering of street lights and traffic signals.
The proposal does not divert funds from any areas, since California regularly sets aside funds for these types of projects. It also would not represent any interruption to the flow of traffic in the state, since the sensors would only be placed under the ground during the regular repaving of roads. No word yet on when this bill will go to a vote or when residents of the state of California can expect to see these changes, should the bill pass in the state legislation.
The space shuttle Endeavour is seen on launch pad 39a as a storm passes by prior to the rollback of the Rotating Service Structure (RSS), Thursday, April 28, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. During the 14-day mission, Endeavour and the STS-134 crew will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) and spare parts including two S-band communications antennas, a high-pressure gas tank and additional spare parts for Dextre. Launch is targeted for Friday, April 29 at 3:47 p.m. EDT. Photo credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
The last flight of the space shuttle Endeavor will be both manned and squidded.
The most famous science experiment on board, of course, will be the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which will set up shop at the ISS to measure cosmic rays, dusting for the fingerprints of dark matter and antimatter. So that’s cool. But is it as cool as baby squid in space?
…why exactly would you want to put squids in space? I mean, besides the cool factor, what is there to be gained? I did a little more poking around, and, bless the internet, there’s a webpage on the project. It turns out that the particular species of squid to be shipped off-planet is our old friend the bobtail squid.
What makes this squid unique is its light organ, which glows at night and hides its shadow from prey lurking underneath. The light is powered by a particular bioluminescent bacteria (Vibrio fishceri) that the squid draws in from the surrounding water. Every day it expels the old bacteria and takes in a new batch. Newly born squid can’t produce the light, but within several hours they become bioluminescent as they take in the bacteria. This development gives scientists a close look at morphogenesis, which is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape—one of the fundamentals of development biology. The squid experiment came about when Ned [faculty sponsor] learned about the work of Dr. Jamie S. Foster at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Dr. Foster’s work is focused on what happens to this morphogenesis process under micro-gravity conditions.
A-ha! So the real question is morphogenesis under micro-gravity, or, what is the effect of gravity on how an organism makes its shape? And the squid/bacteria symbiosis happens to be a good model system to answer this question.
If you’re having a hard time making that connection, it’s because a critical piece of information was omitted from the otherwise excellent summary above. That is, when a newly born squid takes in the bacteria that it needs to produce light, those bacteria induce an serious physical restructuring of the squid’s body so that it can host them appropriately. The baby squid actually changes shape as a result of taking in bacteria.
Which is a pretty wild thing to study all by itself, on Earth, but when you decide to study it in space . . . whoa.
ROBOTIC limbs controlled solely by the mind could be available to paralysed people within a year.
Monkeys are being trained to control what might be the world’s most sophisticated and human-like robot arm. But they never touch the prosthetic limb or fiddle with a remote control: they guide it with their thoughts alone. If trials are successful, in a few months from now people with spinal cord injuries could learn to do the same.
In 2008, Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania published a landmark paper describing how two rhesus macaques learned to feed themselves marshmallows and fruit using a crude robotic limb controlled by electrodes implanted in their brains (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06996). No brain-controlled prosthetic limb had ever carried out a more complex real-world task. Still, Schwartz envisioned a more elegant and nimble device that paralysed people could use – something much closer to a human hand.
Enter the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL), a bionic limb that closely approximates the form and agility of a human arm and hand. Born from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics programme, and designed by Michael McLoughlin’s team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, the MPL is made from a combination of lightweight carbon fibre and high-strength alloys. It has 22 degrees of freedom, compared with the human arm’s 30, and can grasp precisely and firmly without crushing fragile objects. The wrist and elbow rotate with ease and, like an average human limb, it weighs just under 4.5 kilograms.
“I would say it’s very close to human dexterity,” says McLoughlin. “It can’t do absolutely everything – it can’t cup the palm, for example – but it can control all fingers individually. I don’t think there is another limb that approaches it.” ..
Mummies found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb are at the centre of a dispute over DNA analysis.
Jo Marchant – Some researchers claim to have analysed DNA from Egyptian mummies. Others say that’s impossible. Could new sequencing methods bridge the divide?
Cameras roll as ancient-DNA experts Carsten Pusch and Albert Zink scrutinize a row of coloured peaks on their computer screen. There is a dramatic pause. “My god!” whispers Pusch, the words muffled by his surgical mask. Then the two hug and shake hands, accompanied by the laughter and applause of their Egyptian colleagues. They have every right to be pleased with themselves. After months of painstaking work, they have finally completed their analysis of 3,300-year-old DNA from the mummy of King Tutankhamun.
Featured in the Discovery Channel documentary King Tut Unwrapped last year and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)1, their analysis — of Tutankhamun and ten of his relatives — was the latest in a string of studies reporting the analysis of DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies. Apparently revealing the mummies’ family relationships as well as their afflictions, such as tuberculosis and malaria, the work seems to be providing unprecedented insight into the lives and health of ancient Egyptians and is ushering in a new era of ‘molecular Egyptology’. Except that half of the researchers in the field challenge every word of it.
Enter the world of ancient Egyptian DNA and you are asked to choose between two alternate realities: one in which DNA analysis is routine, and the other in which it is impossible. “The ancient-DNA field is split absolutely in half,” says Tom Gilbert, who heads two research groups at the Center for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen, one of the world’s foremost ancient-DNA labs.
Unable to resolve their differences, the two sides publish in different journals, attend different conferences and refer to each other as ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’ — when, that is, they’re not simply ignoring each other. The Tutankhamun study reignited long-standing tensions between the two camps, with sceptics claiming that in this study, as in most others, the results can be explained by contamination. Next-generation sequencing techniques, however, may soon be able to resolve the split once and for all by making it easier to sequence ancient, degraded DNA. But for now, Zink says, “It’s like a religious thing. If our papers are reviewed by one of the other groups, you get revisions like ‘I don’t believe it’s possible’. It’s hard to argue with that.” …
The disagreement stems from the dawn of ancient-DNA research. In the 1980s, a young PhD student called Svante Pääbo worked behind his supervisor’s back at the University of Uppsala in Sweden to claim he had done what no one else had thought was possible: clone nuclear DNA from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy2. Soon researchers realized that they could use a new technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify tiny amounts of DNA from ancient samples. There was a burst of excitement as DNA was reported from a range of ancient sources, including insects preserved in amber and even an 80 million-year-old dinosaur3.
Then came the fall. It turned out that PCR, susceptible to contamination at the best of times, is particularly risky when working with tiny amounts of old, broken-up DNA. Just a trace of modern DNA — say from an archaeologist who had handled a sample — could scupper a result. The ‘dinosaur’ DNA belonged to a modern human, as did Pääbo’s pioneering clone. Once researchers began to adopt rigorous precautions4, including replicating results in independent labs, attempts to retrieve DNA from Egyptian mummies met with little success5.
That’s no surprise, say sceptics. DNA breaks up over time, at a rate that increases with temperature. After thousands of years in Egypt’s hot climate, they say, mummies are extremely unlikely to contain DNA fragments large enough to be amplified by PCR. “Preservation in most Egyptian mummies is clearly bad,” says Pääbo, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthroplogy in Leipzig and a leader in the field. Ancient-DNA researcher Franco Rollo of the University of Camerino in Italy went so far as to test how long mummy DNA might survive. He checked a series of papyrus fragments of various ages, preserved in the similar conditions to the mummies. He estimated that DNA fragments large enough to be identified by PCR — around 90 base pairs long — would have vanished after only around 600 years6.
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Despite the message from WordPress yesterday saying this blog was suspended due to a violation of the terms of service, as happened four months ago, the message and suspension was an error.
![[GARDNER.Imich1]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AX585_GARDNE_G_20110427175452.jpg)
Ralph Gardner – … I met Alexander Imich at a party where he was the oldest person in the room. That may not sound like a big deal—more and more frequently these days I attend events where I am the oldest person. But the party where I met Dr. Imich was for people over the age of 100, and there were a couple dozen of them.
Our most traumatic memories could be erased, thanks to the marine snail
The 
ROBOTIC limbs controlled solely by the mind could be available to paralysed people within a year.
