Those things that go bump in the night? About one-third of people believe they could be ghosts. And nearly one out of four, 23 percent, say they’ve actually seen a ghost or felt its presence, finds a pre-Halloween poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos.

Full Story: Yahoo! News.

(via Boing Boing).

Scientists have discovered a ground-breaking way of levitating ultra small objects, which may revolutionise the design of micro-machines, a new report says.

Physicists said they can create “incredible levitation effects” by manipulating so-called Casimir force, which normally causes objects to stick together by quantum force.

Full Story: Yahoo!.

(thanks James!).

If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.

Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to ‘let them go.’

Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.

Full Story: Yahoo! News.

Australia’s prime minister announced plans Thursday to ban pornography and alcohol for Aborigines in northern areas and tighten control over their welfare benefits to fight child sex abuse among them.

Some Aboriginal leaders rejected the plan as paternalistic and said the measures were discriminatory and would violate the civil rights of the country’s original inhabitants. But others applauded the initiative and recommended extending the welfare restrictions to Aborigines in other parts of the country.

Full Story: Yahoo! News.

(via Hit and Run)

Taylor and Boan are hardly basement-dwelling paranoids obsessed with tinfoil hats and Area 51. Taylor holds advanced degrees in astronomy and physics, and is an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. He and Boan have done consulting work for the Defence Department and the U.S. space agency
NASA.

But their views have won few audiences outside of science fiction conventions, and their book is published by BrownWalker Press, which specialises in fringe topics and books with titles like “The Science and Lore of the Plant Cell Wall” and “ESP and Psychokinesis”.

Full Story: Yahoo!

(Made any more relevant by this news?)

Speaking of R.U. Sirius, the new underground culture site Alterati (founded by James Curcio) has a podcast interview up with Sirius, conducted by Technoccult guest editor Jason Lubyk.

R.U. Sirius interview.

Alterati.

Way cooler than Yahoo! Underground.

Update: Alterati was not technically founded by James Curcio. It is an evolution of Grey Lodge. Jason and another Technoccult guest editor, Wes Unruh, are the editors at large.

David Brown, 24, says he woke up one morning after a night out with friends with a telephone number constantly running through his head. He decided to contact it, sending a message saying “Did I meet you last night?.”

Random recipient Michelle Kitson was confused and wary at first but decided to reply and the two began exchanging messages. Eventually they met and fell in love.

Full Story: Yahoo!

(via T0tem7).

A Thai Buddhist monk cut off his penis with a machete because he had an erection during meditation and declined to have it reattached, saying he had renounced all earthly cares, a doctor and a newspaper said on Wednesday.

The 35-year-old monk, whose name was withheld for privacy reasons, allowed medical staff at Maharaj hospital, 780 km (480 miles) south of Bangkok to dress his wound, but refused reattachment, hospital chief Prawing Euanontouch said.

Full Story: Yahoo! News (thanks, Trevor).

Kathleen Vohs, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues, conducted a series of nine experiments in which people were asked to do puzzles or other tasks and the behavior of people exposed to money was compared to others who were not prompted to think about it.

The two groups acted differently, the researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

“The mere presence of money changes people,” Vohs said. “The effect can be negative, it can be positive. Exposure to money, or the concept of money, elevates a sense of self-sufficiency,” and can make people less social.

Full Story: Yahoo!

Nationwide, Masonic groups operate in a separate-but-supposedly-equal system in which whites typically join one network of Masonic groups, called Grand Lodges, and blacks typically join another, called Prince Hall.

But in the South, it goes further: White-controlled Grand Lodges in 12 Southern states do not even officially recognize black Masons as their brothers – the Masonic term is “mutual recognition” – and in some cases, black lodges have taken similar stands.

Full Story: Yahoo! News.

I remember reading about a study in Madrid around 1999 or 2000 in which THC was found to kill brain tumors in mice. It was on Yahoo! News and the story was removed after a week or two, and I’ve never been able to find anything else about it… until now:

Dr Melamede said whereas nicotine activated carcinogenic compounds, THC – one of 60 cannabinoids derived from the cannabis plant – had been shown to inhibit them in mice cells.

“Compounds found in cannabis have been shown to kill numerous cancer types including lung, breast, prostate, leukaemia, lymphoma and skin cancer.”

But he said the effects of cannabis were complex as evidence also suggested low doses of THC could stimulate growth of lung cancer cells.

BBC.

Whenever I tune into the type of reality show where producers save the destitute by giving them an expensive house and bigger tits I find myself wanting to scream out loud at the emotional manipulation. Having known the developmentally delayed as well as many autistic and Asperberger’s children and having grown up with a physically disabled sister, I generally withold a lot of the self-serving pity that characterizes attitudes toward the clinically abnormal. The recent lawsuit by a black family against the family who used them for an “extreme” house makeover represents the cream of shit. The upcoming NBC program Three Wishes could take this phenomenon to new levels.

Where to begin? The website informs the reader that “deserving” individuals will receive these mythic wishes. So far as we can tell “deserving” means having a severely impaired IQ, a crash helmet and a projected lifespan of less than thirty years. Really, tho, this show just seems to represent the logical concordance of both “extreme reality makeovers” (what the fuck do any of those three words mean individually let alone collectively?) and the Wesley Willis branch of outsider art. While the late Mr. Willis clearly held the reins on the freakshow to which he dedicated most of the last two years of his life, Three Wishes seems little more than an excuse for Middle America to gawk at cripples.

I see no problem with the Old Timey Freak Shows of yore. Such groups generally allowed for human anomalies to congregate together with “others of their kind” (which generally had more to do with genuine tolerance than body type) and make some money off of damned fools who would pay to stare at their deformities. That said, shows like Three Wishes seem the inverse of the freak show. Rather than allowing for a collectivity to emerge and empowering those marginalized and outcast because of their bodies, emotionally manipulative “reality” programming serves only to make difference more of a spectacle. And who benefits? Television producers, certainly not the poor saps getting fucked by them.

I suggest reading the below article about the impending lawsuit then watching a reality show remembering how such things become assembled in post-production.

Yahoo Article”

This one’s old, but interesting. At first glance this story from Yahoo! news seems to be a legitimate but bizarre news story.

MANCHESTER, England — Here’s some good news that vegetarians can really sink their teeth into: Researchers have developed genetically engineered fruit trees that bear real meat!

Fruit from the new Meat Trees, developed by British scientists using gene-splicing technology, closely resembles ordinary grapefruit. But when you peel the large fruit open, inside is fresh beef.

But actually, it’s from Weeky World News. Thanks for the tip, Grant!

There was a time when the name R.U. Sirius was synonymous with cyberculture. His seminal magazine Mondo 2000 predated Wired, and was even more enthusiastic in its wow-gosh sexification of the new geek order. Articles predicting a slick future of nanotech parties and smart drugs were mixed in with batches of fearful predictions of terrorism, economic collapse, draconian copyright enforcement, increased surveillance and invasive advertising. But Sirius didn’t stop there: After the collapse of Mondo, he went on to write for magazines like 21C, Salon and Disinformation, and edited Getting It. He created the Revolution Party, a non-ideological anti-authoritarian political organization (“If even the alternative parties like Libertarian and Green seem a bit rigid to you, consider joining us”), and campaigned for Presidency of the United States. His latest project, The Thresher, is a political magazine.

But The Thresher is a print magazine. Sirius hardly goes online anymore, except for research. The truth is, the Godfather of GeekChic has moved on.
Read the rest of this entry »

Douglas Rushkoff’s new novel is now online with the title Exit Strategy. The annotations of the book are “open source”… anyone can write annotations to the novel (which is being serialized on Yahoo Internet Life). The novel has also been released in the UK as Bull, where it’s a normal printed book.

Smokedot pointed to an article on THC Today that states that the US government has known about studies that indicate that THC may slow the growth of certain cancers. The article mentions a study that was suppressed in the 70s, as well as a more recent Madrid Test (which I remember reading about last year on Yahoo! Daily News but I can’t find it anymore). Anyway, I’m not sure this is reliable info about the 1974 study, but the Madrid study is certainly interesting.

And speaking of weed… Plastic reports that there is a Dutch company that has figured out a way to legally ship weed to the US (I don’t recommend trying this, though).

Conspiracy theorists may be familiar with the beliefs that asprin may help ward off cancer and AIDs. Yahoo! Daily News is reporting that aspirin helped reduce the heart attack death rate over the past 20 years. Good stuff.

According to Yahoo! Daily News an international fertility group is set to try to clone a human in Italy. The team plans “so-called therapeutic cloning to help tackle a range of degenerative diseases.”