Yes and this is the horror story… and it is true!

‘We were smart enough to eradicate measles, but arrogant enough to invite it back. Welcome to a four-part series on the precise ways we’re fucking up 50 years of medical progress. ‘ By Leigh Cowart

The great Persian physician Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī carefully documented  this little strand of RNA tucked in a protein envelope and which  has enjoyed a rare kind of notoriety, even in the shock-and-awe world of infectious diseases.

In 1529, the Spanish introduced it to Cuba, killing two out of three natives. Over the next decade or so, the virus ravaged Central America, decimating many populations and killing up to half of all Hondurans. And in 1693 in colonial America, Virginia governor Edmund Andros issued a proclamation for a “day of Humiliation and Prayer” in the hope of waylaying the virus.

It is one of the leading causes of death among young children, despite our ability to safely vaccinate against it. It is estimated that between the years of 2000 and 2013, vaccination has prevented 15.6 million deaths.

But please  read for yourself.

View at Medium.com

And if you are an anti vaccine being, hang you head in shame. THERE IS NO AND I STRESS ABSOLUTELY NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF THAT VACCINATION CAUSE AUTISM AND IF YOU ARE STUPID ENOUGH TO CHOOSE TO BELIEVE IT REMEMBER ONE PERSON WITH MEASLES CAN INFECT UP TO 18 UNVACIINATED PEOPLE AND SOME OF THEM MAY BE BABIES WHO WILL DIE.

The Boy who did not come back from Heaven

http://newsfeed.gawker.com/little-boy-who-claimed-to-die-and-visit-heaven-admits-h-1679811262?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

‘I did not go to heaven’: Paralyzed boy admits he made up best-selling book about how he ascended to paradise and met Jesus after car wreck.

Alex co-wrote the book with his father, pictured. He is now divorced from his mother and lives separately from his son

His story was made into the best-selling book The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, which was co-authored with his father Kevin and first published in 2010.
The mother adds that Alex previously told a pastor that the book was made up, but was told the publication was ‘blessing’ people and to stay quiet.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2913259/Man-wrote-best-selling-book-saw-heaven-near-death-experience-six-year-old-admits-thing-up.html#ixzz3P3Ua9IhU
Some of the comments in the Dailymail are really very funny!

Was there not a similar case of a surgeon that also wrote a book about going to heaven but it was debunked by the doctors who attended to him?

So by the way near death experiences do have a neurological explanation about what happens when the brain is starved from oxygen. I am just saying. https://justfletcher.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/proof-of-heaven/

Is there a ghost in the House?

Is there a ghost in the house!

Why O! Why in this day and age are there zillions of people so gullible that they believe in psychics and ghosts?

Is it due to Conmen? One who gains the trust, or “confidence”, of his victims (often called marks) in order to manipulate, steal from, or otherwise predate upon them.

Or is it just plain stupidity?

Or maybe both?

Interesting article about James Randi in the New York Times. Now as you  probably know Randi has a million dollar challenge to anybody who can prove supernatural… and up to now nobody has been able to claim the prize!!! A million dollars, I could do with a million dollars!

And the likes of John Edwards did not even go there: Surprise! surprise!

But here is a link to the Randi article (and of course Uri Geller who has been calles a psychopath also figures). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/the-unbelievable-skepticism-of-the-amazing-randi.html?_r=0

Love the last paragraph

 

In July last year, Randi came closer than ever to the end. He was hospitalized with aneurysms in his legs and needed surgery. Before the procedure began, the surgeon showed Peña scans of Randi’s circulatory system. “Very challenging, a very difficult situation,” the surgeon told him. “But he lived a good life.” The operation was supposed to take two hours, but it stretched to six and a half.

When Randi began to come to, heavily dosed with painkillers, he looked about him in confusion. There were nurses speaking in hushed voices. He began hallucinating. He was convinced that he was behind the curtain before a show and that the whispering he could hear was the audience coming in. The theater was full; he had to get onstage. He tried to look at his watch, but he found he didn’t have it on. He began to panic. When the hallucinations became intensely visual, Peña brought a pen and paper to the bedside. It could prove an important exercise in skeptical inquiry to record what Randi saw as he emerged from a state so close to death, one in which so many people sincerely believed they had glimpsed the other side. Randi scribbled away; his observations, Peña thought, might eventually make a great essay. Later, when the opiates and the anaesthetic wore off, Randi looked at the notes he had written.

They were indecipherable.

 

 

And then of course an interesting experiment. You can see ghosts if you really want to! Here is how!

http://io9.com/test-subjects-made-to-see-ghosts-in-disturbing-lab-ex-1655906924

 

Alzheimer’s in a Petri dish

This is fiction but very good fiction from a very talented author

Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova’s—she’s an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter’s move to L.A.) when the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s begin to emerge. First, Alice can’t find her Blackberry, then she becomes hopelessly disoriented in her own town. Alice is shocked to be diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s (she had suspected a brain tumor or menopause), after which her life begins steadily to unravel. She loses track of rooms in her home, resigns from Harvard and eventually cannot recognize her own children.

 

But this is fact!

Breakthrough Replicates Human Brain Cells for Use in Alzheimer’s Research

 

For the first time, and to the astonishment of many of their colleagues, researchers created what they call Alzheimer’s in a Dish — a petri dish with human brain cells that develop the telltale structures of Alzheimer’s disease. In doing so, they resolved a longstanding problem of how to study Alzheimer’s and search for drugs to treat it; the best they had until now were mice that developed an imperfect form of the disease.

The key to their success, said the lead researcher, Rudolph E. Tanzi ofMassachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was a suggestion by his colleague Doo Yeon Kim to grow human brain cells in a gel, where they formed networks as in an actual brain. They gave the neurons genes for Alzheimer’s disease. Within weeks they saw the hard Brillo-like clumps known as plaques and then the twisted spaghetti-like coils known as tangles — the defining features of Alzheimer’s disease.

The work, which also offers strong support for an old idea about how the disease progresses, was published in Nature on Sunday. Leading researchers said it should have a big effect.

You can also read more here:-

 

 

 

Are we evolving stupidity?

An article that appeared in the latest  New Scientist. You have to subscribe to read this but you can also read here  Technology may be getting smarter, but humans are getting dumber, scientists have warned.

I am not in the least surprised! Off the top of my head I would agree but be careful not to appear discriminatory or politically incorrect.Have you noticed how people write, what they read, the level of their general knowledge? And this is also passed onto their children. Every child has a smart phone with language that I do not understand  really. Shortcut! Everything has to save time , more time to be bored!

The Daily Mail writes An IQ test used to determine whether Danish men are fit to serve in the military has revealed scores have fallen by 1.5 points since 1998.

Between the 1930s and 1980s, the average IQ score in the US rose by three points and in post-war Japan and Denmark, test scores also increased significantly – a trend known as the ‘Flynn effect’.

This increase in intelligence was due to improved nutrition and living conditions – as well as better education – says James Flynn of the University of Otago, after whom the effect is named. 

Now some experts believe we are starting to see the end of the Flynn effect in developed countries – and that IQ scores are not just levelling out, but declining. 

Westerns have lost 14 IQ points on average since the Victorian age, according to a study published by the University of Amsterdam last year.

Jan te Nijenhuis thinks this could be because intelligent women tend to have less children than women who are not as clever, The Huffington Post reported.

The perceived link between IQ and fertility is a very contentious one.

Dr Nijenhuis studied the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 and 2004 to come to his conclusion.

Each study measured peoples’ reaction times – how long they took to press a button after being prompted.

It is claimed that reaction time mirrors mental processing speed – so it reflects intelligence.

They found that visual reaction times averaged 194 milliseconds in the late 19th Century, but in 2004, they had increased to 275 milliseconds.

This would suggest that people have become less intelligent, they said.

But unfortunately the older generation who are supposed to be ‘more intelligent ‘ are now bocoming too lazy to think. A lot are not even computer literate, they have to ask their children. Too lazy to figure it out!!!!!

The amazing brain

I Forgot to remember A Book by Su Meck.

In 1988 a ceiling  fan  fell onto Su’s head and she had total amnesia following the incident. Not only did she not know who she was, she did not recognize her family, her husband, her children, her sibling,s her parents.

Furthermore she was unable to form new memories for a very long time. Given a hairbrush she did not know what to do with it, she had a limited vocabulary and she had to learn almost everything from scratch.

To this day she cannot remember anything from her life prior to 1988 and after that in patches. Yet she recovered well enough to be able to write a book and relate her story.

What I found quite astonishing was the inability of the medical profession to grasp her condition, some even put it down to malingering. But we are no longer the raft on the ocean , we have actually come far. Not that we ever would know more than say 50% ? of the human brain – my estimate.

But had it happened today it would have been a different story.

One of the best free resources for learning about the brain on the internet is the Charlie Rose Brain Series available on streaming video through CharlieRose.com. For two years (2012)  Charlie had been sitting down with Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Eric Kandel as they have explored pioneering discoveries of neuroscience. In each episode Charlie and Dr. Kandel sit down with a roundtable of leading brain scientists and researchers to explore an aspect of neuroscience. If you are interested in neuroscience this is not something to be missed. I suggest you Google this if you are interested.

Lessons of Immortality and Mortality

Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan

We lived in a sandy-colored stone house with an engraved winged serpent and solar disc above the door. It seemed like something straight out of ancient Sumeria, or Indiana Jones — but it was not, in either case, something you’d expect to find in upstate New York. It overlooked a deep gorge, and beyond that the city of Ithaca. At the turn of the last century it had been the headquarters for a secret society at Cornell called the Sphinx Head Tomb, but in the second half of the century some bedrooms and a kitchen were added and, by the 1980s, it had been converted into a private home where I lived with my wonderful mother and father.

My father, the astronomer Carl Sagan, taught space sciences and critical thinking at Cornell. By that time, he had become well known and frequently appeared on television, where he inspired millions with his contagious curiosity about the universe. But inside the Sphinx Head Tomb, he and my mother, Ann Druyan, wrote books, essays, and screenplays together, working to popularize a philosophy of the scientific method in place of the superstition, mysticism, and blind faith that they felt was threatening to dominate the culture. They were deeply in love — and now, as an adult, I can see that their professional collaborations were another expression of their union, another kind of lovemaking. One such project was the 13-part PBS series Cosmos, which my parents co-wrote and my dad hosted in 1980 — a new incarnation of which my mother has just reintroduced on Sunday nights on Fox.

After days at elementary school, I came home to immersive tutorials on skeptical thought and secular history lessons of the universe, one dinner table conversation at a time. My parents would patiently entertain an endless series of “why?” questions, never meeting a single one with a “because I said so” or “that’s just how it is.” Each query was met with a thoughtful, and honest, response — even the ones for which there are no answers.

One day when I was still very young, I asked my father about his parents. I knew my maternal grandparents intimately, but I wanted to know why I had never met his parents.

“Because they died,” he said wistfully.

“Will you ever see them again?” I asked.

He considered his answer carefully. Finally, he said that there was nothing he would like more in the world than to see his mother and father again, but that he had no reason — and no evidence — to support the idea of an afterlife, so he couldn’t give in to the temptation.

“Why?”

Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority. He told me that anything that’s truly real can stand up to scrutiny.

As far as I can remember, this is the first time I began to understand the permanence of death. As I veered into a kind of mini existential crisis, my parents comforted me without deviating from their scientific worldview.

“You are alive right this second. That is an amazing thing,” they told me. When you consider the nearly infinite number of forks in the road that lead to any single person being born, they said, you must be grateful that you’re you at this very second. Think of the enormous number of potential alternate universes where, for example, your great-great-grandparents never meet and you never come to be. Moreover, you have the pleasure of living on a planet where you have evolved to breathe the air, drink the water, and love the warmth of the closest star. You’re connected to the generations through DNA — and, even farther back, to the universe, because every cell in your body was cooked in the hearts of stars. We are star stuff, my dad famously said, and he made me feel that way.

continue to source article at nymag.com

Nature vs Nurture – Again

We have  had this argument nature vs nurture for years now, but intersting the following clip from Foxnews. I have read many other similar cases so by the way. But   Nancy Segal is an expert in this field, or one of. Makes you think. I gave the transcript in case the clip takes too long to open.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1714028783001/nature-vs-nurture-new-twin-study-sparks-debate/

 

It seems like something you — see in the movies but a new study a long term study finds the twins who had never even met since they were born.

Shares much in common as those raised together to joining us now is — expert and author of born together reared apart.

He landmark Minnesota twin study doctor Nancy Segal.

Got a single thanks so much for being here you already perfect guest for this segment because you were part of the team of psychologists and researchers at the university of Minnesota.

Who spent two decades studying.

A 137.

Sets of twins who were raised apart and there are some fascinating stories from the study.

That’s right Alison studying twins raised apart is — that’s natural experiment we have genetic and environmental influences are distant tangled.

And we can look at the differences between identical twins and see where the environment comes in to create these differences in genetically identical people.

Had been — story about the — twin sister these guys were separated at birth they were separated at birth and they did not meet until they were 39 years old they lived in different cities in Ohio.

Naturally it’s not just that — you think it really is gives — a wonderful science because they had so many traits in common both development migraine headaches at the same time in their lives.

They both had wood working proclivities.

They both liked it vacation the same three blocks to the beach in Florida.

They — their dog toy it dog’s — and one has to wonder what drives that perhaps the sound of the name or reminds — of something they.

But at any rate — identical twins raised apart gives us a whole domain.

For explanations.

For how we can understand these kind of things and applied at the general population level.

I added — temperature twins are also interesting to — fraternal twins are fascinating they’re very variable they are genetically the same as ordinary siblings.

But they’re born — same time and share the same — the uterine environment.

And they provide a wonderful control for the identical twins so we can see — identical to a more alike than fraternal — they are that tells us that genes do effect that behavior —

Everyone is fascinated by this topic as I am not having — trends myself should read.

— together reared apart by doctor Nancy Segal thanks so much for coming in to talk about it thank you so — having — Or FOX & Friends just.

Are you a racist?

 

 

You probably are and you are not even aware of it.

Racism is hardwired into the brain, say scientists – and it operates unconsciously.

The same circuits in the brain that allow us to see which ethnic group a person belongs to overlap with others that drive emotional decisions.

The result is that even right-thinking individuals make unconscious decisions based on a person’s race.

Brain scans have proved that interactions with people of other ethnic backgrounds set off reactions that may be completely unknown to our conscious selves.

The finding may force researchers to think about racism in entirely new ways.

It’s possible, the researchers say, that even right-thinking, ‘egalitarian’ people could harbour racist attitudes without knowing.

The chemicals involved in perceiving ethnic backgrounds overlap with those for processing emotion and making decisions, according to new research.

And the findings published in Nature Neuroscience could lead to fresh ways of thinking about unintended race-based attitudes and decisions.

Are psychopaths responsible for their deeds?

 

I have blogged this previously but it is in the news again.

‘I would have done it again’ Anders Breivik

Devoid of shame or an ounce of remorse about massacring defenceless teenagers, Breivik appears tormented by his failure to go to university.

Then I read a review on the book The Psychopath Test where Hare ( I think he is an academic) and I quote from the Amazon review explains the science of psychopathology: a part of the brain called the amygdala doesn’t function in psychopaths as it does in other human beings. When a regular person experiences extreme violence or carnage (or even photographs of such scenes), his amygdala becomes overstimulated, provoking an extreme anxiety response in the central nervous system. When a psychopath experiences the same stimuli, his amygdala does not respond: no anxiety response occurs. This explains the psychopath’s lack of empathy.

This is a theory of course but does this mean psychopaths are not responsible for their actions?

Which implies of course that these monsters and perpetrators should be excused.

What a sad and cruel world

 

 

I do believe although he may well be responsible for his actions he should be sent to an asylum so that he will be locked up for the remainder of his ‘natural’ life. Furthermore I question the theory postulated here because you will have to test thousands and thousands  of psychopaths before you can come tho this conclusion. Even then it still would not be a fact.