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Contents contributed and discussions participated by aqconces

aqconces

Hitler constantly high on crystal meth while leading Nazi Germany: report - NY Daily News - 0 views

  • New research shows that the German Nazi leader was on a constant supply of crystal methamphetamines to stay awake and energized, according to the UK Independent.
  • The intoxicated Fuhrer, a famous hypochondriac, was on more than 74 different medications while he ordered the systematic murders of Jews across Europe
  • It also claims he took nine shots of methamphetamine while living out his last days in his bunker to ease his pain and stress
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  • Hitler was on a steady stream of barbiturate tranquilizers, morphine, nasal and eye drops containing cocaine and other drugs — along with bulls’ semen to boost his testosterone — thanks to his Berlin-based personal physician, Theodor Morell, according to the report
  • He was characterized as “a quack and a fraud and a snake oil salesman”
  • Hitler was shown to have signs of Parkinson's disease by the end of World War II in 1945, and the dizzying array of drugs likely contributed to his serious health issues.
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    Studies show that Hitler was constantly high on crystal meth while leading Germany.  Fuhrer was on more than 74 different medications while he ordered murders of Jews.  
aqconces

BBC - Future - How pickpockets trick your mind - 0 views

  • Pickpockets use much more than sleight of hand, says Caroline Williams, they hack your brain’s weaknesses.
  • He must have slid out the 20 euro note at the same time. I didn’t even notice until an hour later. I felt so stupid.”
  • According to neuroscientists our brains come pretty much hard-wired to be tricked, thanks to the vagaries of our attention and perception systems.
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  • The most important of these loopholes is the fact that our brains are not set up to multi-task. Most of the time that is a good thing – it allows us to filter out all but the most important features of the world around us.
  • In fact, the key requirement for a successful pickpocket isn’t having nifty fingers, it’s having a working knowledge of the loopholes in our brains. Some are so good at it that researchers are working with them to get an insight into the way our minds work.
  • “A street thief will avoid like the plague people who are demonstrating a very open awareness of their environment. The man on the tube who is looking around, being very aware, they won’t go anywhere near,”
aqconces

BBC - Future - How extreme isolation warps the mind - 0 views

  • When people are isolated from human contact, their mind can do some truly bizarre things, says Michael Bond. Why does this happen?
  • One of the most disturbing effects was the hallucinations.
  • “In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my head around to find that nothing was there,” she wrote in the New York Times in 2011
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  • “At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realised the screams were my own.”
  • We’ve known for a while that isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnera
  • In the 1950s and 1960s, China was rumoured to be using solitary confinement to “brainwash” American prisoners captured during the Korean War, and the US and Canadian governments were all too keen to try it out.
aqconces

BBC - Future - The contagious thought that could kill you - 0 views

  • To die, sometimes you need only believe you are ill
  • we can unwittingly ‘catch’ such fears, often with terrifying consequences.
  • It’s a consistent phenomenon, but medicine has never really dealt with it — Ted Kaptchuk, Harvard Medical School
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  • Over the last 10 years, doctors have shown that this nocebo effect – Latin for “I will harm” – is very common.
  • In trials for Parkinson’s disease, as many as 65% report adverse events as a result of their placebo. “And around one out of 10 treated will drop out of a trial because of nocebo, which is pretty high,” he says.
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    Is it possible to think yourself to death?
aqconces

BBC - Future - Are there 'oceans' hiding inside the Earth? - 0 views

  • Underneath the Earth’s oceans, the crust can be as little as five kilometres (three miles) thick.
  • is there more water down there than we thought?
  • Professor Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University, think that the rocks in the Earth’s mantle might have had a part to play as well; specifically a magnesium-rich silicate called ringwoodite.
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  • “I’m trying to ask big questions of where the Earth’s water came from,” he says. “One of the reasons I study rocks is they allow us to peer back in time.”
aqconces

BBC - Future - Why do we pick our nose? - 0 views

  • ost of us do it, but few of us will admit to it. If we get caught red-handed, we experience shame and regret. And we tend to frown upon others when they do it in public.
  • Is nose-picking really all that bad? How prevalent or bad is it, really?
  • Andrade and Srihari compiled data from 200 teenagers. Nearly all of them admitted to picking their noses, on average four times per day. That's not all that enlightening; we knew this. But what are interesting are the patterns. Only 7.6% of students reported sticking their fingers into their noses more than 20 times each day, but nearly 20% thought they had a “serious nose-picking problem”. Most of them said they did it to relieve an itch or to clear out nasal debris, but 24 of them, i.e. 12%, admitted that they picked their nose because it felt good.
aqconces

BBC - Future - Why your body jerks before you fall asleep - 0 views

  • f you have ever wondered why people’s arms and legs twitch suddenly as they are drifting off to sleep, our resident psychologist Tom Stafford has the answer.
  • we give up our bodies to sleep, sudden twitches escape our brains, causing our arms and legs to jerk. Some people are startled by them, others are embarrassed. Me, I am fascinated by these twitches, known as hypnic jerks.
  • ormally we are paralysed while we sleep. Even during the most vivid dreams our muscles stay relaxed and still, showing little sign of our internal excitement. Events in the outside world usually get ignored
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  • The most common movements we make while asleep are rapid eye-movements. When we dream, our eyes move according to what we are dreaming about.
aqconces

BBC - Future - The man who gets drunk on chips - 0 views

  • giving
  • “Every day for a year I would wake up and vomit,” he says. “Sometimes it would come on over the course of a few days, sometimes it was just like ‘bam! I’m drunk’.”
  • No alcohol had passed his lips, but not everyone believed him. At one point, his wife searched the house from top to bottom for hidden bottles of booze. “I thought everyone was just giving me a rough time, until my wife filmed me and then I saw it – I looked drunk.”
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  • giving
  • he suffers from “auto-brewery syndrome”
  • “The problem arises when the yeast in our gut gets out of hand. Bacteria normally keep the yeast in check, but sometimes the yeast takes over.”
aqconces

BBC - Future - Cancer: The mysterious miracle cases inspiring doctors - 0 views

  • “We watched for a period of a few months and the tumours just disappeared,”
  • “There had been no doubt about her diagnosis,” he says. “But now there was nothing in the biopsies, or the scans.”
  • After 20 weeks, the patient was cancer-free.
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  • our immune system should hunt out and destroy mutated cells before they ever develop into cancer. Occasionally, however, these cells manage to sneak under the radar, reproducing until they grow into a full-blown tumour.
aqconces

As Mainstream Religion Embraces Marriage Equality, The "Threat to Religious L... - 0 views

  • Allowing all couples to marry has zero impact on anybody's legally protected free exercise of religion
  • The legal basics of marriage equality and religion are not that complicated: The courts are addressing only civil marriage. No church will ever be forced to change its definition of marriage
  • Problems arise only when religious organizations act in the commercial realm -- such as by operating a public catering hall -- or when business owners harbor religious qualms about serving gay people (or black people or Japanese people) in their restaurants, bakeries, entertainment venues, or other public accommodations. In these settings, civil rights laws trump personal preferences -- even those based on religious conviction. That's a consensus we came to as a society long ago. Have a religious objection to serving Mexicans or Mormons or interracial couples? Don't open a lunch counter.
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  • The related suggestion that the freedom to marry violates some uniform "religious" definition of marriage is equally misguided.
  • But the freedom to marry is now endorsed as well by the Episcopal Church, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
aqconces

A scientific tale of two dresses - CNN.com - 0 views

shared by aqconces on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • "Why do some people love cilantro and others say it tastes like soap? Why do some people have perfect pitch and others are tone deaf? It's the same with vision — our sensory apparatus is fine tuned,"
  • The cones in our retinas — the fine layer of nerve tissue that lines the back of our eyes — detect the blue, green, and red in an image. The cones and your brain mix those colors to make other colors.
  • "Ninety-nine percent of the time, we'll see the same colors," Haller says. "But the picture of this dress seems to have tints that hit the sweet spot that's confusing to a lot of people."
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  • "Your brain is constantly estimating the color of the light that's falling on the object and factoring that light out," said Wallace Thoreson, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "Each of us makes slightly different unconscious assumptions."
aqconces

Why parents want to believe in a vaccine conspiracy - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • for how could we ever really know whether the vaccine was the cause?
  • I did more research, and I learned that scientific organizations around the world — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — had proved the vaccine theory false. No one could say for sure what caused autism, but they certainly could say that it wasn’t a vaccine.
  • it’s easy to understand why some parents of children with autism want to see conspiracy and evil where none exists
aqconces

What it will take for a head transplant to work - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon at the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group who has claimed that advances in medical science now make it possible to carry out head transplants that would allow patients to not only survive, but function normally
  • “I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible,” Canavero told New Scientist.
  • While expert opinions on Canavero’s claims vary, the possibility isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. James Harrop, director of Adult Reconstructive Spine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and co-editor of Congress of Neurological Surgeons, says that the kind of complications the surgeons faced back in 1970 could easily be fixed using today’s methods.
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  • “Technically it’s not any harder than a liver and heart transplant,” he says
aqconces

Clash of the billionaires: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are duking it out over space - The ... - 0 views

  • At stake is the right to pursue what many view as a potentially momentous breakthrough in space flight: the ability to launch a rocket into space, return it to Earth, and then launch it again as if it were a commercial air plane.
  • The ability to reuse rockets could dramatically lower the cost of space flight.
aqconces

Salvation Army puts #thedress in a new light with powerful domestic violence ad - 0 views

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    Whether you loved or hated #thedress debate that consumed the Internet last week (is it black and blue or white and gold??), you might want to pay attention to this. The Southern African branch of the Salvation Army has tweeted an image of a potent new ad that repurposed the mind-boggling viral content to make something that is likely to seem a little more meaningful.
aqconces

28 Internet acronyms every parent should know - CNN.com - 1 views

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    Guys, really important article we should all read!  Those nasty parents are on to us!!!!
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