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Thursday, December 19, 2013

Marijuana Businesses May Get Good Banking News In Early 2014

Marijuana Businesses May Get Good Banking News In Early 2014

Matt Ferner
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Matt.Ferner@huffingtonpost.com
 
"What we're being told," Finlaw said on the call hosted by Drug Policy Alliance, "is probably in the first quarter of 2014 there will be some guidance issued that's comparable to the Cole memo from the Department of Justice that will give, maybe not a green light, but a yellow light to banks to allow them to do business [with marijuana businesses] -- to take deposits, to set up checking accounts, to set up small business loans, to allow these businesses to accept purchases through debit cards or credit cards, to allow what normal businesses are allowed to do."

Last week, the Bank Secrecy Advisory Group had a closed-door meeting in Washington, D.C., to begin talks about reforming banking regulations so that banks can legally engage in services with marijuana businesses.

Currently marijuana businesses aren't allowed to set up legal bank accounts because the federal government still considers marijuana to be illegal. Worried banks fear that they could be implicated as money launderers if they offered traditional banking services to the pot businesses.

"It's my understanding that the ball is in the court of the Department of Treasury," Finlaw added. "The Department of Justice having issued the Cole memo and having signaled to Treasury that they would be willing to see some accommodation in the banking regulations, is working with FinCEN in Treasury."

FinCEN is a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury that analyzes financial data to mitigate against illicit use and money laundering.

Even if the DOJ and Treasury give the "yellow light" to banks, there would also continue to be some oversight by the banks to ensure that the marijuana businesses they work with are not a front for illegal activity, Finlaw said.

Thursday's news follows a DOJ announcement in August that it is "actively considering" how to regulate interactions between banks and marijuana shops that operate within state laws and don't violate other federal law enforcement priorities.

Although official regulations have not been set, for now, financial institutions and other enterprises that do business with marijuana shops that are in compliance with state laws are unlikely to be prosecuted for money laundering or other federal crimes that could be brought under existing federal drug laws, as long as those pot businesses don't otherwise violate the DOJ's enforcement priorities, a senior Department of Justice official said.

"My understanding is there is a discussion in Washington about how much of this can be accomplished administratively through FinCEN, Treasury and Justice, and how much Congress needs to do something," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance, on Thursday's joint call. "It may be the reason for putting out a yellow light instead of a green light, [it] may have to do with some constraints in federal law and the administrative agencies trying to figure out how far they can accommodate these legitimate needs for access to legal banking while staying within the constraints of federal law."

Finlaw also noted that no one in Washington had given timing on the release of a marijuana business banking memo, but that the first quarter was the hope and expectation based on how the process has been working thus far and how long it took for the DOJ's Cole memo to be released.
"The hope is that we can get this resolved in early 2014," Finlaw said.

Dan Riffle, director of federal policies at Marijuana Policy Project, told The Huffington Post that the hope is that the banking issue is resolved before recreational marijuana retail shops open in Washington in Colorado in 2014.

"This raises obvious safety concerns and tax compliance issues, and one of the primary reasons Colorado and Washington voters approved initiatives to regulate marijuana was to reduce the risk of violence and ensure sales of marijuana are taxed appropriately," Riffle said. "It's imperative that Treasury, FinCEN, and the DOJ work together to resolve this issue as soon as possible in order to honor the will of voters in those states."

Messages to DOT and DOJ regarding the possibility of a first-quarter announcement were not immediately returned.

Colorado's first recreational marijuana shops are expected to open on Jan. 1, 2014, with Washington state's opening later in the new year.
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Reversing Aging: Not as Crazy as You Think

Harvard researchers find a new compound that can make old cells young again
By @aliceparknyDec. 19, 2013
 
Original page:  http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/19/reversing-aging-not-as-crazy-as-you-think/
170955888
 
What makes cells age? Wear and tear, yes. But biologically, says, Dr. David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, it’s lack of oxygen that signals cells that it’s their time to go. Without oxygen, the energy engines known as the mitochondria become less efficient at turning physiological fuel such as glucose into the energy that the cells need to function. Eventually, they shut down.

But in a paper published in the journal Cell, Sinclair and his colleagues describe for the first time a compound naturally made by young cells that was able to revive older cells and make them energetic and youthful again. In an experiment in mice, the team found that giving older mice a chemical called NAD for just one week made two-year old mouse tissue resemble that of six-month old mice (In human years, that would be akin to a 60-year old’s cells becoming more like those belonging to a 20 year old).

As mammals age, says Sinclair, levels of NAD drop by 50%; with less of the compound, the communication between the cell and its mitochondrial energy source also falters, and the cell becomes vulnerable to common aging assaults — inflammation, muscle wasting, and slower metabolism. By tricking the cell into thinking it’s young again, with adequate amounts of NAD, aging can theoretically be reversed. “When we give the molecule, the cells think oxygen levels are normal, and everything revs back up again,” Sinclair says.

While NAD may be a key to the fountain of youth, Sinclair, who also investigated the anti-aging effects of the red wine compound resveratrol, isn’t ready to say that the chemical could lead to immortal cells. “I wouldn’t take it that far,” he says. “What makes reversing aging interesting is that it could buy more time than we are currently looking at.”

His next step is to put NAD in the drinking water of his mice, and see if they take longer to develop the typical chronic diseases linked to aging, such as inflammation, muscle wasting, cancer and diabetes. The pathway may become an important target for cancer researchers as well, since tumors typically grow in low oxygen conditions and are more common in older patients.

Because NAD is a naturally occurring compound that simply declines with age, Sinclair is optimistic that boosting its levels in people won’t have as many significant adverse effects as introducing an entirely new compound might. “If a body is slowly falling apart and losing the ability to regulate itself effectively, we can get it back on track to what it was in its 20s and 30s,” he says.

At least that’s the hope.
 

@aliceparkny

Alice Park is a staff writer at TIME and covers health, medicine, nutrition and fitness.


Read more: Reversing aging: scientists say yes, it may be possible | TIME.com http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/19/reversing-aging-not-as-crazy-as-you-think/#ixzz2nyLAyGZm
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Silencing Synapses to Deal With Addictions: ScienceDaily

ScienceDaily: Your source for the latest research news.

Dec. 17, 2013 — Imagine kicking a cocaine addiction by simply popping a pill that alters the way your brain processes chemical addiction. New research from the University of Pittsburgh suggests that a method of biologically manipulating certain neurocircuits could lead to a pharmacological approach that would weaken post-withdrawal cocaine cravings. The findings have been published in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers led by Pitt neuroscience professor Yan Dong used rat models to examine the effects of cocaine addiction and withdrawal on nerve cells in the nucleus accumbens, a small region in the brain that is commonly associated with reward, emotion, motivation, and addiction. Specifically, they investigated the roles of synapses -- the structures at the ends of nerve cells that relay signals.
When an individual uses cocaine, some immature synapses are generated, which are called "silent synapses" because they send few signals under normal physiological conditions. After that individual quits using cocaine, these "silent synapses" go through a maturation phase and acquire the ability to send signals. Once they can send signals, the synapses will send craving signals for cocaine if the individual is exposed to cues that previously led him or her to use the drug.

The researchers hypothesized that if they could reverse the maturation of the synapses, the synapses would remain silent, thus rendering them unable to send craving signals. They examined a chemical receptor known as CP-AMPAR that is essential for the maturation of the synapses. In their experiments, the synapses reverted to their silent states when the receptor was removed.

"Reversing the maturation process prevents the intensification process of cocaine craving," said Dong, the study's corresponding author and assistant professor of neuroscience in Pitt's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. "We are now developing strategies to maintain the 'reversal' effects. Our goal is to develop biological and pharmacological strategies to produce long-lasting de-maturation of cocaine-generated silent synapses."

The above story is based on materials provided by University of Pittsburgh. The original article was written by Melissa Carlson.
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Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry

Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry

Electron's shapeliness throws a curve at supersymmetry

A "molecular eye" view of the vacuum chamber used for the measurement of the electron's EDM. Credit: B.R. O'Leary
  
A small band of particle-seeking scientists at Yale and Harvard has established a new benchmark for the electron's almost perfect roundness, raising doubts about certain theories that predict what lies beyond physics' reigning model of fundamental forces and particles, the Standard Model.
  
"We know the Standard Model does not encompass everything," said Yale physicist David DeMille, who with John Doyle and Gerald Gabrielse of Harvard leads the ACME collaboration, a team using a strikingly different method to detect some of the same types of particles sought by huge experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe. "Like our LHC colleagues, we're trying to see something in the lab that's different from what the Standard Model predicts."

ACME is looking for new particles of matter by measuring their effects on the shape of the electron, the negatively charged subatomic particle orbiting within every atom.  
 
In research published Dec. 19 in Science Express, the team reported the most precise measurement to date of the electron's shape, improving it by a factor of more than 10 and showing the particle to be rounder than predicted by some extensions of the Standard Model, including some versions of Supersymmetry.
 
This theory posits new types of particles that help account, for example, for dark matter, a mysterious substance estimated to make up most of the universe.  Researchers said they have shown that the electron's departure from spherical perfection—if it exists at all—must be smaller than predicted by many theories proposing particles the Standard Model doesn't account for. If the electron's shape is too round, many of these theories will be proven wrong, they said.
 
Many variants of Supersymmetry predict a less round shape for the electron than the ACME team found experimentally. If the particles predicted by those versions of Supersymmetry existed, they would have caused greater deformation of the electron, researchers said.

The ACME project looked for a particular deformation in the electron's shape known as an electric dipole moment.  "You can picture the dipole moment as what would happen if you took a perfect sphere, shaved a thin layer off one hemisphere and laid it on top of the other side," said DeMille, who helped establish previous landmark limits in electron deformation. "The thicker the layer, the larger the dipole moment. Now imagine an electron blown up to the size of the earth. Our experiment would have been able to see a layer 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, moved from the southern to the northern hemisphere. But we didn't see it, and that rules out some theories."

The ACME researchers measured the dipole moment using electrons inside the polar molecule thorium monoxide. The molecule's properties amplify the electron's deformation and diminish the possibility of effects that could fool researchers into thinking they had seen a tiny deformation when none exists.

"It is amazing that some of these predicted supersymmetric particles would squeeze the electron into a kind of egg shape," said Harvard's Doyle. "Our experiment is telling us that this just doesn't happen at our level of sensitivity."

Gabrielse, also of Harvard, said: "It's unusual and satisfying that the exquisite precision achieved by our small team in a university lab probes the most fundamental building block of our universe at a sensitivity that complements what is being achieved by thousands at the world's largest accelerator."
More information: "Order of Magnitude Smaller Limit on the Electric Dipole Moment of the Electron," Science Express, 2013.



Provided by Yale University
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Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup | New York Post

Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup | New York Post

Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup

By Paul Sperry
December 15, 2013 | 5:13am

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After the 9/11 attacks, the public was told al Qaeda acted alone, with no state sponsors.
But the White House never let it see an entire section of Congress’ investigative report on 9/11 dealing with “specific sources of foreign support” for the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals.
It was kept secret and remains so today.
President Bush inexplicably censored 28 full pages of the 800-page report. Text isn’t just blacked-out here and there in this critical-yet-missing middle section. The pages are completely blank, except for dotted lines where an estimated 7,200 words once stood (this story by comparison is about 1,000 words).
A pair of lawmakers who recently read the redacted portion say they are “absolutely shocked” at the level of foreign state involvement in the attacks.
Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) can’t reveal the nation identified by it without violating federal law. So they’ve proposed Congress pass a resolution asking President Obama to declassify the entire 2002 report, “Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Some information already has leaked from the classified section, which is based on both CIA and FBI documents, and it points back to Saudi Arabia, a presumed ally.
The Saudis deny any role in 9/11, but the CIA in one memo reportedly found “incontrovertible evidence” that Saudi government officials — not just wealthy Saudi hardliners, but high-level diplomats and intelligence officers employed by the kingdom — helped the hijackers both financially and logistically. The intelligence files cited in the report directly implicate the Saudi embassy in Washington and consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks, making 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war.
Modal Trigger
The findings, if confirmed, would back up open-source reporting showing the hijackers had, at a minimum, ties to several Saudi officials and agents while they were preparing for their attacks inside the United States. In fact, they got help from Saudi VIPs from coast to coast:
LOS ANGELES: Saudi consulate official Fahad al-Thumairy allegedly arranged for an advance team to receive two of the Saudi hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi — as they arrived at LAX in 2000. One of the advance men, Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi intelligence agent, left the LA consulate and met the hijackers at a local restaurant. (Bayoumi left the United States two months before the attacks, while Thumairy was deported back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.)
SAN DIEGO: Bayoumi and another suspected Saudi agent, Osama Bassnan, set up essentially a forward operating base in San Diego for the hijackers after leaving LA. They were provided rooms, rent and phones, as well as private meetings with an American al Qaeda cleric who would later become notorious, Anwar al-Awlaki, at a Saudi-funded mosque he ran in a nearby suburb. They were also feted at a welcoming party. (Bassnan also fled the United States just before the attacks.)
WASHINGTON: Then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar and his wife sent checks totaling some $130,000 to Bassnan while he was handling the hijackers. Though the Bandars claim the checks were “welfare” for Bassnan’s supposedly ill wife, the money nonetheless made its way into the hijackers’ hands.
Other al Qaeda funding was traced back to Bandar and his embassy — so much so that by 2004 Riggs Bank of Washington had dropped the Saudis as a client.
The next year, as a number of embassy employees popped up in terror probes, Riyadh recalled Bandar.
“Our investigations contributed to the ambassador’s departure,” an investigator who worked with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington told me, though Bandar says he left for “personal reasons.”
FALLS CHURCH, VA.: In 2001, Awlaki and the San Diego hijackers turned up together again — this time at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a Pentagon-area mosque built with funds from the Saudi Embassy. Awlaki was recruited 3,000 miles away to head the mosque. As its imam, Awlaki helped the hijackers, who showed up at his doorstep as if on cue. He tasked a handler to help them acquire apartments and IDs before they attacked the Pentagon.
Awlaki worked closely with the Saudi Embassy. He lectured at a Saudi Islamic think tank in Merrifield, Va., chaired by Bandar. Saudi travel itinerary documents I’ve obtained show he also served as the ­official imam on Saudi Embassy-sponsored trips to Mecca and tours of Saudi holy sites.
Most suspiciously, though, Awlaki fled the United States on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11.
As I first reported in my book, “Infiltration,” quoting from classified US documents, the Saudi-sponsored cleric was briefly detained at JFK before being released into the custody of a “Saudi representative.” A federal warrant for Awlaki’s arrest had mysteriously been withdrawn the previous day. A US drone killed Awlaki in Yemen in 2011.
HERNDON, VA.: On the eve of the attacks, top Saudi government official Saleh Hussayen checked into the same Marriott Residence Inn near Dulles Airport as three of the Saudi hijackers who targeted the Pentagon. Hussayen had left a nearby hotel to move into the hijackers’ hotel. Did he meet with them? The FBI never found out. They let him go after he “feigned a seizure,” one agent recalled. (Hussayen’s name doesn’t appear in the separate 9/11 Commission Report, which clears the Saudis.)
SARASOTA, FLA.: 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited a home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd. FBI agents investigating the connection in 2002 found that visitor logs for the gated community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers. Just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi luxury home was abandoned. Three cars, including a new Chrysler PT Cruiser, were left in the driveway. Inside, opulent furniture was untouched.
Democrat Bob Graham, the former Florida senator who chaired the Joint Inquiry, has asked the FBI for the Sarasota case files, but can’t get a single, even heavily redacted, page released. He says it’s a “coverup.”
Is the federal government protecting the Saudis? Case agents tell me they were repeatedly called off pursuing 9/11 leads back to the Saudi Embassy, which had curious sway over White House and FBI responses to the attacks.
Just days after Bush met with the Saudi ambassador in the White House, the FBI evacuated from the United States dozens of Saudi officials, as well as Osama bin Laden family members. Bandar made the request for escorts directly to FBI headquarters on Sept. 13, 2001 — just hours after he met with the president. The two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony while discussing the attacks.
Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the World Trade Center attacks and heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families, calls the suppression of Saudi evidence a “coverup beyond belief.” Last week, he sent out an e-mail to relatives urging them to phone their representatives in Congress to support the resolution and read for themselves the censored 28 pages.
Astonishing as that sounds, few lawmakers in fact have bothered to read the classified section of arguably the most important investigation in US history.
Granted, it’s not easy to do. It took a monthlong letter-writing campaign by Jones and Lynch to convince the House intelligence panel to give them access to the material.
But it’s critical they take the time to read it and pressure the White House to let all Americans read it. This isn’t water under the bridge. The information is still relevant ­today. Pursuing leads further, getting to the bottom of the foreign support, could help head off another 9/11.
As the frustrated Joint Inquiry authors warned, in an overlooked addendum to their heavily redacted 2002 report, “State-sponsored terrorism substantially increases the likelihood of successful and more ­lethal attacks within the United States.”
Their findings must be released, even if they forever change US-Saudi relations. If an oil-rich foreign power was capable of orchestrating simultaneous bulls-eye hits on our centers of commerce and defense a dozen years ago, it may be able to pull off similarly devastating attacks today.
Members of Congress reluctant to read the full report ought to remember that the 9/11 assault missed its fourth target: them.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration” and “Muslim Mafia.”
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Government Scientists Create Crude Oil from Algae in Minutes

By Adam Clark Estes at Gizmo magazine.  Original post at
http://gizmodo.com/government-scientists-created-crude-oil-from-algae-in-m-1485731339

Be excited, Earthlings, because science has a surprise for you. Engineers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have devised a way to turn algae into crude oil in less than an hour. That oil can then be refined into gasoline that can run engines.
 
Excited yet? Try wrapping your head around the implications of a breakthrough like this. As one of the most plentiful lifeforms on the planet, algae is a perfect candidate for conversion to biofuel. It's especially good because the energy is packed pretty tightly into that green sludge. To replace all of the petroleum in the United States with algae fuel, you'd need a farm that took up just 0.42 percent of the country's landmass. By comparison, it would take up half of the United States to grow enough soybeans to replace petroleum with biodiesel.
 
Algae fuel is not a new idea, of course, and this is not the first time scientists have turned algae into fossil fuel. It is the first time they've done it so effortlessly and so quickly, however. Other methods require too much time and energy for the conversion to make sense as a petroleum replacement. The new process solves that problem. "It's a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher," said Douglas Elliott, who led the research. "In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We're just doing it much, much faster."
 
This magic gas could be coming to your local gas station sooner than you think. The Department of Energy already has a partner, Genifuel, working on commercializing the process and making the algae fuel competitive with what's already on the market. But, boy, is it going to be futuristic when you pull up to a gas station and pump your tank full of algae. Talk about going green.
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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Why Are Female Redheads Sexualized and Male Redheads Reviled?

 
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Prince Harry: Heartthrob or mutant?
(Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images)
“Red hair is a woman's game,” Tom Robbins writes in his 1998 GQ essay “Ode to Redheads.” “The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blonds who've spoiled from lack of refrigeration,” Robbins says. “They look like brown-haired men who've been composted. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junk yard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.” That’s a grim view of redheaded men—and it was coming from a fellow ginger.

This month, British photographer Thomas Knights—also a redhead—hopes to turn that stereotype on its head with “Red Hot,” a photo exhibition featuring “a cast of high profile and good-looking red headed males,” shot giving torrid looks in topless poses. Male redheads “are completely emasculated and desexualised in popular culture,” Knights told the Guardian. “The main thing for me is the huge polarisation between the way our society perceives ginger men and ginger women.”
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Why do we see redheaded women as rubies and redheaded men as rusted? Perhaps because the rarity of the shade—redheads benefit (or suffer) from two doses of a recessive gene that causes a mutation in the protein that regulates melanin—has inspired a historical association with difference and deviance. In the Middle Ages, red hair was taken as a sign of witchcraft and vampirism; Elizabethan actors portrayed Jewish characters with false noses and red wigs; and Judas is often painted with a long, fiery mane. For women, the perception of deviance is often eroticized. The sins attributed to women are largely sexual ones. And the expression of this sexual deviance is often rooted in the follicles. "Hair itself is symbolically fraught,” University of Texas myth scholar Betty Sue Flowers told the Washington Post in 2002. “Hair equals sex. Why do women have to cover their hair in churches? There are more rules about hair than anything else except covering the genitals. It's so connected with spiritual and religious taboos." 

The result? Red is now the shade of choice for contemporary femme fatales, from Jessica Rabbit to Joan Holloway. Meanwhile, ginger boys are ridiculed and sexually marginalized; in 2011, a Danish-based international sperm bank stopped collecting donations from redheads, saying it was “drowning in semen” from unpopular ginger donors. Try to think of a famous redheaded man who isn’t Damian Lewis or a prince, and you get a lot of clowns: Conan O'Brien, Louis CK, Carrot Top.

The myth of the sexy redhead and her deviant brother was constructed by male apostles, playwrights, and painters. Some women buy that version of sexuality, too: Knights interviewed one woman who willingly dates a ginger man but still fears the consequences: "Of course I'm going to love it, but I don't want a ginger baby," she said. But projects like Knights' show how easy it is to revert that centuries-old idea by taking a few photos from a different perspective (and recruiting some exceptionally good-looking gingers to pose). “Someone recently asked me, ‘What’s so special about red hair?’ ” Knights told The Cut. “Well, nothing. It’s not special—it’s just equal. All I want is for ginger men to be on a level playing field.”
Amanda Hess is a freelance writer and DoubleX contributor. She lives in Los Angeles. Tweet at her @amandahess.
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It’s a Christmas Miracle! New Study Shows That 1% of Women Claim to Have Virgin Births

It’s a Christmas Miracle! New Study Shows That 1% of Women Claim to Have Virgin Births

David Strumfels -- though probably a hoax, it isn't physiologically/biologically impossible and probably does happen at least on very rare occasions, just as it does with many other animals.

It’s a Christmas Miracle! New Study Shows That 1% of Women Claim to Have Virgin Births

December 18, 2013 By 40 Comments
***Update***: BMJ is known to write parody papers in their Christmas edition. So while the material below is plausible, take it with a grain of salt. It’s likely a hoax.
(In a related study, 1% of women lie to researchers.)

The headline’s serious, though it requires a little more explanation.

A new report published in the Christmas edition of BMJ shows that 0.8% of women who became pregnant also claimed, at the time when the child would have been conceived, that they were not having sexual intercourse:

Based on interviews with 7,870 women and girls ages 15-28, 45 of the 5,340 pregnancies in this group through the years — 0.8 per cent — occurred in women who reported that they conceived independent of men. The figure does not include pregnancies that result from in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technology.

The girls were 12 to 18 years old when they entered the study in the 1994-95 school year and were interviewed periodically about their health and behaviour over 14 years, including via computer as a way to encourage them to be candid when answering questions about their sexual history.

The 45 women and girls who became pregnant despite, according to what they told interviewers, being virgins at the time of conception differed in several ways from peers who acknowledged that men had had a role in their procreation.

So why would they lie…?

Turns out nearly a third of them had signed pledges saying they wouldn’t have sex before marriage. Hell, they may have been wearing purity rings as they got it on.

They “Virgin Birthers” were also “more likely than non-virgins to say their parents never or rarely talked to them about sex and birth control.”

They were also less likely to know how to use a condom.

And, I’m assuming, they wanted to sound like they were chaste, even to the researchers who didn’t know them, and even though the evidence to the contrary was growing right inside of them. (It’s also possible they didn’t realize that they technically had sex.)

I love the conclusion:

The researchers found that although the mothers in question were more likely to have boys than girls and to be pregnant during the weeks leading up to Christmas, neither similarity to the Virgin Mary was statistically significant.

You’ll be interested in knowing there were a few “virgin fathers” as well.
(Thanks to Christopher for the link)
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Pathogenic hypothesis on the possible role of CagA-positive strains in ischaemic heart disease. : Clinical effects of Helicobacter pylori outside the stomach : Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology : Nature Publishing Group

Pathogenic hypothesis on the possible role of CagA-positive strains in ischaemic heart disease. : Clinical effects of Helicobacter pylori outside the stomach : Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology : Nature Publishing Group

Figure 1: Pathogenic hypothesis on the possible role of CagA-positive strains in ischaemic heart disease.

FromClinical effects of Helicobacter pylori outside the stomach

Journal name:
Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology
Year published:
DOI:
doi:10.1038/nrgastro.2013.243

Additional data

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I've Been to VietNam But Never Saw This


I stole this from Google+.  It's in Vietnam, probably in the north somewhere.  Now I've been to VN, and saw some amazing things, but nothing like this.

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Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The idea that recent mass shooters are mostly registered Democrats is a myth from Examinrer.com

Original article can be found at:
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-idea-that-recent-mass-shooters-are-mostly-registered-democrats-is-a-myth
 
By Keith Darling-BrekhusTulsa FBI Examiner
 
Based on the assertions of Roger Hedgecock a right-wing radio show host, the meme that the five worst recent mass shootings were committed by registered Democrats is making its way through e-mail chains and social media. Hedgecock asserts, without providing any evidence or sources, that the Ft. Hood shooter, the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora Theater shooter and Adam Lanza of Sandy Hook infamy were all “registered Democrats”. He acknowledges that Klebold and Harris (the Columbine Colorado shooters) were too young to be registered voters but asserts, again without providing any evidence, that Harris and Klebold’s parents were progressives or liberal Democrats. All of these charges are utterly baseless and perhaps do not even deserve a response. However, given the effectiveness of right-wing lies in saturating social media and duping the incurious (a far too numerous segment of the population), some more detailed debunking is in order.

To the best of my ability, I have attempted to research these claims with as much rigor as possible. If there is any evidence for or against my debunking, I welcome that evidence in the spirit of free inquiry. Let me also state that given that neither major political party condones mass shooter violence in any way, shape or form, and that all these acts are individual acts of violence that are not sanctioned by either elected Democrats or Republicans (at least not mainstream leaders in either party), the very notion that they are acting on behalf of a political party is itself problematic. This is not to say that mass shootings are apolitical acts, but rather it is to say that as political acts they may express an ideology (racism, misogyny, entitlement, psychosis, etc) but they do not in general express alignment with a political party or if they do it is not an association that the Democrats or Republicans would accept as legitimate (neither party wants to claim James Holmes or Adam Lanza as a member in good standing, no matter what Holmes or Lanza feels about them). In any case, we can categorically REJECT the notion that any of the shooters in question has been shown to be a registered Democrat on a case by case basis.

1. Nidal Hasan (the Ft. Hood shooter) lived in either Virginia (his state of residence prior to being sent to Ft. Hood) or Texas, neither of which has partisan registration. Therefore the claim that he was a "registered Democrat" is false. I do not know if he voted or how he voted, but I do know that unless he was registered in a state in which he did not reside, that the claim that he is a registered Democrat is FALSE.

2. Since Virginia does not have partisan registration there is also no way to tell whether Seung-Hui Cho was a Democrat, but again because there is no partisan registration in the state we can say that the claim that he is a registered Democrat is FALSE. (Update: A more obvious point is that Cho was a resident alien, not a US citizen, so he was not eligible to vote in the US)

3. The allegation that James Holmes was registered Democrat was based on a Breitbart blogger Joel B. Pollack, who found voter registration records for a DIFFERENT James Holmes who was about the same age. Alex Jones’ Infowars and other right-wing websites then dutifully repeated the lie without verifying it. It was later determined that the Colorado Theater Shooter James Holmes was NOT registered to vote, as evidenced by this retraction: {Newly-released information on the suspect’s birthdate (which, as indicated in our initial report, was a slight mismatch), combined with new details Breitbart News has obtained about the suspect’s likely addresses, together suggest that the suspect may, in fact, not have been registered to vote.}. However, most of right-wing media continued to promote the lie without printing Breitbart sites retraction. The claim that James Holmes was a registered Democrat is FALSE.

4. The claim that Adama Lanza is a registered Democrat has been suggested based not on any evidence that he was registered as one, but on the rather dubious claim that because Connecticut has almost 2 to 1 Democratic registration over Republicans, he was probably a Democrat. (Claim: "Adam Lanza, NewtownConn murderer. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about a 2-1 ratio in Connecticut. The odds are therefore that the Lanza family are (sic) Democrats.") This of course is a bogus argument to begin with, but even if we were to make the claim that a mass shooter’s political affiliation must be the same as the majority of the people in his area, we can debunk this foolish idea by taking this shoddy analysis down to the local level. Yes, Connecticut voted for Barack Obama, BUT the city of Newtown voted for Mitt Romney. If we look at the results we find that Mitt Romney defeated Barack Obama in Newtown by 7451-6784 votes or 51.7 percent to 47 percent. Republican Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Linda McMahon carried the city over Democrat Chris Murphy by an even larger margin. Add in the other information we have that Lanza’s mother was a “doomsday prepper” and a home schooler in a Republican-leaning city and we can pretty well dispense with the erroneous assumption that Lanza must have been a Democrat (UPDATE: According to at least one media source, Nancy Lanza was a registered Republican. The source does not provide a link, but the author of this article is seeking further confirmation). We can therefore claim that with no evidence to support the claim, the assertion that Lanza was a Democrat is not demonstrated and that in the absence of any evidence it is likely FALSE.

5. Klebold and Harris of course were not old enough to vote and they had no apparent political affiliation. Allegations that they came from families of Democrats or liberal progressives appear to have no sources to substantiate those claims. What little ideology the boys demonstrated owed mostly to an admiration for Timothy McVeigh not Ted Kennedy. Harris’ father was a retired Air Force pilot and Eric Harris wanted to join the Marine Corps. The boys lived in Littleton, Colorado a relatively conservative and affluent suburb of Denver. The claim that their parents were Democrats is UNSUBSTANTIATED. Any suggestion that the two boys were Democrats is demonstrably FALSE.

Interestingly, Hedgecock and those on the far right have conveniently overlooked a number of cases where ideology is clearly right-wing. The acts below are instances of right-wing violence that are unequivocally committed by people who are openly hostile to liberalism. While this does not mean these killers are Republicans, it is quite clear that they are RIGHT-WINGERS and that they have far more in common with Mr. Hedgecock, Alex Jones and the other gun-toting conspiracy nuts on the right than with any evils associated with the Democratic Party or liberalism. In addition, to the list below is the obvious case of Timothy McVeigh, who I have not included because his crime was not committed with firearms. It was however, committed by a right-winger and the carnage was on a massive scale.

For example, on July 18, 1984 James Oliver Huberty, who told his wife he hated “children, Mexicans and the United States” opened fire inside the McDonald’s Restaurant in San Ysidro, CA using a Browning P-35 Hi-Power 9mm pistol, Winchester 1200 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, and an Israeli Military Industries 9mm Carbine (Uzi) – all legally acquired. He killed 21 and injured 19 before he was shot dead by police.

On Aug. 10, 1999 White supremacist Buford O. Furrow, Jr., fired 70 rounds with an Uzi-type submachine-gun inside the lobby of the Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, CA wounding three children, a teenage counselor and an office worker. He then carjacked a woman’s Toyota at gunpoint, dumped it behind a motel and murdered US Postal Worker Joseph Santos with a Glock 9mm handgun.

On July 27, 2008 Former U.S. Army private, Jim David Atkinsson, who hated Democrats, liberals, African Americans and homosexuals, using a Remington Model 48 12-gauge shotgun, murdered two people and injured seven others inside the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, TN.

The day after Obama’s inauguration, white supremacist Keith Luke went on a killing spree in Brockton, Massachusetts. His goal was to kill as many Jews, blacks and Hispanics as possible. When questioned by investigators, the deranged gunman who had stockpiled hundreds of rounds of ammunition, proclaimed that he was fighting the extinction of the white race.

A little over a month later, Donnie Baker, a former Republican campaign volunteer shot seven Chilean immigrants in Florida. Those who knew him said he was obsessed with the fear that illegal immigrants were taking over the country.

In April of 2009, Richard Popalowski, a white supremacist in Pittsburgh, shot and killed three police officers following a domestic disturbance call. He apparently thought that Obama was part of a government conspiracy to seize all guns, and he feared the government would take his guns away.
Later the same month, a Fort Walton Beach Florida man who thought the Obama administration was conspiring against him, shot and murdered two sheriff’s deputies.

On May 31, 2009 Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his own church by a right-wing “pro- life” gun man who decided to express his belief in the sanctity of human life by executing a medical doctor.

Eleven days later a right-wing white supremacist and Holocaust denier walked into the National Holocaust Museum and killed an African-American security guard. Two weeks later, three Neo-Nazis were arrested for bombing a diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona.

On April 20, 2010 a member of the Sovereign Citizen movement was arrested after a failed attempt to take over a Tennessee county courthouse.

Exactly one month later, in West Memphis Arkansas, Sovereign citizens Jerry and Joe Kane murdered two police officers before they themselves were shot and killed in the ensuing shoot out with police.

On July 18, 2010 Byron Williams, an angry unemployed man, was arrested by police after they discovered a car full of weapons and ammunition that he had planned to use to kill progressives. He was on his way to the non-profit Tides Foundation Center, a favorite target of vitriol from Glenn Beck’s radio show.

On Jan. 8, 2011 22-year old Jarold Lee Laughner killed six people, including a judge and a nine-year old child, and wounded 13 others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), using a 9mm Glock 19 pistol during a public meeting in a supermarket parking lot near Tuscon, AZ.

On Aug. 5, 2012 Wade Michael Page, a 40-year old white supremacist and U.S. Army veteran murdered six people and wounded four others inside a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, WI with a Springfield XD(M) semi-automatic pistol.

Suggested by the author

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What the Insurance Industry Thinks About Climate Change - Slashdot

What the Insurance Industry Thinks About Climate Change - Slashdot

What the Insurance Industry Thinks About Climate Change 385
Posted by samzenpus
from the hedge-your-bets dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes

"Joseph Stromberg reports at the Smithsonian that if there's one group has an obvious and immediate financial stake in climate change, it's the insurance industry and in recent years, insurance industry researchers who attempt to determine the annual odds of catastrophic weather-related disasters say they're seeing something new. 'Our business depends on us being neutral. We simply try to make the best possible assessment of risk today, with no vested interest,' says Robert Muir-Wood, the chief scientist of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a company that creates software models to allow insurance companies to calculate risk. Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn't happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming. 'Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,' says Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. 'It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.' A pronounced shift can be seen in extreme rainfall events, heat waves and wind storms and the underlying reason is climate change, says Muir-Wood, driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions. 'The first model in which we changed our perspective is on U.S. Atlantic hurricanes. Basically, after the 2004 and 2005 seasons, we determined that it was unsafe to simply assume that historical averages still applied,' he says. 'We've since seen that today's activity has changed in other particular areas as well—with extreme rainfall events, such as the recent flooding in Boulder, Colorado, and with heat waves in certain parts of the world.' Muir-Wood puts his money where his mouth is. 'I personally wouldn't invest in beachfront property anymore,' he says, noting the steady increase in sea level we're expecting to see worldwide in the coming century, on top of more extreme storms. 'And if you're thinking about it, I'd calculate quite carefully how far back you'd have to be in the event of a hurricane.'"
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Life possible in the early Universe : Nature News & Comment

Original article:  Life possible in the early Universe : Nature News & Comment

Planets orbiting the first stars could have been habitable, challenging arguments for a multiverse.
 

L. Calçada/ESO
Life on other planets could have been warmed by the afterglow of the Big Bang.

Aliens might have existed during the Universe’s infancy. A set of calculations suggests that liquid water — a pre­requisite for life — could have formed on rocky planets just 15 million years after the Big Bang.

Abraham Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has realized that in the early Universe, the energy required to keep water liquid could have come from the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang, rather than from host stars. Today, the temperature of this relic radiation is just 2.7 kelvin, but at an age of around 15 million years it would have kept the entire Universe at a balmy 300 kelvin, says Loeb, who posted his calculations to the arXiv preprint server this month (http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613).

Loeb says that rocky planets could have existed at that time, in pockets of the Universe where matter was exceptionally dense, leading to the formation of massive, short-lived stars that would have enriched these pockets in the heavier elements needed to make planets. He suggests that there would have been a habitable epoch of 2 million or 3 million years during which all rocky planets would have been able to maintain liquid water, regardless of their distance from a star. “The whole Universe was once an incubator for life,” he says.

Loeb’s result also challenges the anthropic principle, a line of reasoning that is invoked to explain why certain physical parameters seem to be tuned to the precise values needed for life: the Universe is the way it is because beings exist to observe it. The principle is consistent with the idea of a multiverse: if multiple universes exist, each based on different parameters, then intelligent beings should not be surprised to find themselves in one in which those para­meters are suited to life.

Related stories

More related stories
In the 1980s, Nobel laureate and physicist Steven Weinberg used an anthropic argument to calculate a maximum value for a measure of the intrinsic energy of the vacuum in space that, in theory, would push space outwards. Weinberg pointed out that unless this value is tiny, it would have torn matter apart before the Sun, Earth or humans could have come into existence. His prediction seemed to be confirmed in the late 1990s, when astronomers discovered dark energy, which seems to act like a vacuum force that accelerates the expansion of the Universe — but by only a small amount.

According to particle physicists’ calculations, dark energy should actually be some 120 orders of magnitude stronger than Weinberg’s maximum value. Multiverse proponents take this as evidence that multiple universes exist that have higher values of vacuum energy.
“The whole Universe was once an incubator for life.”
But during Loeb’s proposed habitable epoch, matter was so dense that even if the vacuum energy had been a million times stronger, it would not have prevented the formation of stars and rocky planets, and the emergence of life. Thus, Loeb says, advocates of the anthropic principle cannot claim that the small value observed now is the only one that could be observed by living beings.

Responses to Loeb’s work vary. Christopher Jarzynski, a biophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, is not convinced that life could exist in a uniformly warm Universe. Life on Earth depends thermo­dynamically not only on the heat source of the Sun, but also on the cold cosmic microwave background, which provides a heat sink, he notes. “Life feeds off this,” he says. And Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, says that a few million years is too short a time to produce intelligent life.

Yet Freeman Dyson, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, thinks that life might be more adaptable than we think. “Anything is habitable if you are clever enough,” he says.
Journal name:
Nature
Volume:
504,
Pages:
201
Date published:
()
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Carl Sagan and Jacob Bronowski Issue Same Words of Warning 25 Years apart.



I'd like to combine with this an old post (Isaac Asimov write a lot on this too)t, and ask, quite seriously, if we have made serious progress yet.  All comments invited.


Word of Warning from Forty Years Ago by Jacob Bronowski in "Ascent of Man"

"Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. This is really crucial today. You can see it is pointless to advise people to learn differential equations, or do a course in electronics or computer programming. And yet, fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress, is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist. The commonplace of the schoolbooks of tomorrow is the adventure of today, and that is what we are engaged in."

That was in 1973. It is not 2023, meaning that we have but ten years left to make this vision a reality or we are all in peril. I think Bronowski was pessimistic in his prophecy, but there must be some time period in which it is true. We may not have but a decade, but certainly only decades before it will be true. which means tht we must start now if there is to be any realistic hope. Less than half of Americans accept Darwinian evolution. Many don't trust scientific and technological progress even though they themselves benefit from it.

In 1973 Jacob Bronowski, in his famous book "Ascent of Man", makes the following statement: "Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures. You cannot possibly maintain that informed integrity if you let other people run the world for you while you yourself continue to live out of a ragbag of morals that come from past beliefs. This is really crucial today. You can see it is pointless to advise people to learn differential equations, or do a course in electronics or computer programming. And yet, fifty years from now, if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress, is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist. The commonplace of the schoolbooks of tomorrow is the adventure of today, and that is what we are engaged in." That was in 1973. It is not 2013, meaning that we have but ten years left to make this vision a reality or we are all in peril. I think Bronowski was pessimistic in his prophecy, but there must be some time period in which it is true. We may not have but a decade, but certainly only decades before it will be true. which means tht we must start now if there is to be any realistic hope. Less than half of Americans accept Darwinian evolution. Many don't trust scientific and technological progress even though they themselves benefit from it.

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More Walter Mitty than James Bond: How climate change expert posed as CIA agent for 10 years — RT USA

More Walter Mitty than James Bond: How climate change expert posed as CIA agent for 10 years — RT USA

David Strumfels comment:  Global deniers will probably make of this, although it isn't relevant to the scientific evidence of global warming.  But it does make one wonder.

More Walter Mitty than James Bond: How climate change expert posed as CIA agent for 10 years

Published time: December 17, 2013 11:21
Edited time: December 17, 2013 17:37
John C. Beale (Photo from flickr.com/oversight)
John C. Beale (Photo from flickr.com/oversight)
                                          
A leading American expert on climate change and the Environmental Protection Agency’s highest-paid employee, deserves to spend 30 months behind bars for lying to his bosses about being a CIA spy to avoid doing his real job, US federal prosecutors say.

Prosecutors described John Beale’s actions as “crimes of massive proportion” that were “offensive” to those who actually work for the CIA, NBC reported.

Beale pled guilty in September, and has been accused of major fraud of almost $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade.

While Beale claimed to have a James Bond-style lifestyle, in reality he was leading a Walter Mitty-style fantasy double life.

At one point, Beale in fact claimed to be urgently needed in Pakistan because the Taliban was torturing his CIA replacement, according to EPA Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan, who headed the investigation into Beale’s activities.

“Due to recent events that you have probably read about, I am in Pakistan,” Beale wrote to Gina McCarthy, the EPA’s administrator, in an e-mail dated December 18, 2010. “Got the call Thurs and left Fri. Hope to be back for Christmas ….Ho, ho, ho.”

The EPA official also failed to show at his workplace for long stretches of time, for instance, 18 months starting from June 2011. During this period, he did “absolutely no work,” according to Beale’s lawyer.

In 2008, Beale didn’t show up at the EPA for six months, telling his boss that he was part of a special multi-agency election-year project relating to “candidate security.” He billed the government $57,000 for five trips to California that were made purely “for personal reasons,” his lawyer acknowledged. It turned out that Beale’s parents lived there.

He also claimed to be suffering from malaria that he got while serving in Vietnam – another story that turned out to be a lie.

Among his bonuses and travel expenses were first-class trips to London, where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.

However, most of the time Beale avoided work he was at his Northern Virginia home, riding bikes, doing housework and reading books, or at a vacation house on Cape Cod – all while he claimed he was at the CIA’s Northern Virginia headquarters.

“He’s never been to Langley (the CIA’s Virginia headquarters),” said Patrick Sullivan. “The CIA has no record of him ever walking through the door.”

At the same time, Beale had been the highest-paid official at the EPA, receiving $206,000 a year.
Beale’s scam was revealed in 2013 when it was noticed that he was still receiving his salary a year and a half after he retired.

When first questioned by EPA officials early in 2013 about his alleged CIA undercover work, Beale brushed them off by saying he couldn’t discuss it, according to Sullivan.

Weeks later, after being confronted again by investigators, Beale admitted to lying, but “didn’t show much remorse” and explained he acted this way to “puff up his own image.”

Through his lawyer, Beale has asked the prosecution for leniency, blaming his behavior on psychological problems.

“With the help of his therapist, Mr. Beale has come to recognize that, beyond the motive of greed, his theft and deception were animated by a highly self-destructive and dysfunctional need to engage in excessively reckless, risky behavior,” attorney John Kern wrote.

The lawyer added that the desire to manipulate people by making up grandiose lies stemmed from Beale’s “insecurities.”

The two sentencing memos and other documents on the trial present new details of the case that’s been branded one of the most audacious and creative federal frauds in history.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God, How could this possibly have happened in this agency? I’ve worked for the government for 35 years. I’ve never seen a situation like this,” Patrick Sullivan told NBC News.

One of the most important points raised by the investigation was that why it took the EPA administration so long to start looking into Beale’s grandiose stories.

“There’s a certain culture here at the EPA where the mission is the most important thing. They don’t think like criminal investigators. They tend to be very trusting and accepting,” Sullivan said.

It was revealed that Beale publicly retired, but kept getting his salary for another year and a half, with his expense vouchers approved by his colleague whose conduct is now looked into.

Beale is set to be sentenced in Washington on Wednesday.
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Brain Neurons Subtract Images, Use Differences: ScienceDaily

ScienceDaily: Your source for the latest research news.  Original source of this article:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131217104240.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Ftop_news%2Ftop_science+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Top+News+--+Top+Science%29&utm_content=FaceBook

Dec. 17, 2013 — Researchers have hitherto assumed that information supplied by the sense of sight was transmitted almost in its entirety from its entry point to higher brain areas, across which visual sensation is generated. "It was therefore a surprise to discover that the data volumes are considerably reduced as early as in the primary visual cortex, the bottleneck leading to the cerebrum," says PD Dr Dirk Jancke from the Institute for Neural Computation at the Ruhr-Universität. "We intuitively assume that our visual system generates a continuous stream of images, just like a video camera. However, we have now demonstrated that the visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences."
 
Plus or minus: the brain's two coding strategies
The researchers recorded the neurons' responses to natural image sequences, for example vegetation landscapes or buildings. They created two versions of the images: a complete one and one in which they had systematically removed certain elements, specifically vertical or horizontal contours. If the time elapsing between the individual images was short, i.e. 30 milliseconds, the neurons represented complete image information. That changed when the time elapsing in the sequences was longer than 100 milliseconds. Now, the neurons represented only those elements that were new or missing, namely image differences. "When we analyse a scene, the eyes perform very fast miniature movements in order to register the fine details," explains Nora Nortmann, postgraduate student at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück and the RUB work group Optical Imaging. The information regarding those details are forwarded completely and immediately by the primary visual cortex. "If, on the other hand, the time elapsing between the gaze changes is longer, the cortex codes only those aspects in the images that have changed," continues Nora Nortmann. Thus, certain image sections stand out and interesting spots are easier to detect, as the researchers speculate.

"Our brain is permanently looking into the future"
This study illustrates how activities of visual neurons are influenced by past events. "The neurons build up a short-term memory that incorporates constant input," explains Dirk Jancke. However, if something changes abruptly in the perceived image, the brain generates a kind of error message on the basis of the past images. Those signals do not reflect the current input, but the way the current input deviates from the expectations. Researchers have hitherto postulated that this so-called predictive coding only takes place in higher brain areas. "We demonstrated that the principle applies for earlier phases of cortical processing, too," concludes Jancke. "Our brain is permanently looking into the future and comparing current input with the expectations that arose based on past situations."

Observing brain activities in millisecond range
In order to monitor the dynamics of neuronal activities in the brain in the millisecond range, the scientists used voltage-dependent dyes. Those substances fluoresce when neurons receive electrical impulses and become active. Thanks to a high-resolution camera system and the subsequent computer-aided analysis, the neuronal activity can be measured across a surface of several square millimetres. The result is a temporally and spatially precise film of transmission processes within neuronal networks.
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