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Aishah Ali’s Interview with Geoscientist Leuren Moret

“Ever since she knew about the devastating effects of radiation and depleted uranium pollution on the world as a result of nuclear weapons, geoscientist Leuren Moret has been on a crusade to stop wars and weapons testing. The War Crimes Conference and Exhibition held at the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur recently was eye-opening and conscience-raising in its condemnation of the atrocities of war. During the three-day event, attendees gained insight into the horrors of past conflicts and the impending threat to our future if wars continue. Among the many impassioned pledges was a move to establish a War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia this year and try U.S. President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard for their roles in initiating the illegal Iraq war.

The Kuala Lumpur Initiative to Criminalize War is a global movement introduced several years ago by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia. The February War Crimes Conference is the most recent of the annual events organized by the Perdana Global Peace Forum. The event fielded distinguished speakers who shared their expertise and showcased a number of war victims from Iraq and Palestine who gave a human face to the grim discourse with their heartrending testimonies.

Among the eloquent speakers was geoscientist and international radiation specialist Leuren Moret, who gave a startling revelation about the effects of radiation and how our global environment has been contaminated from atomic bomb testing since 1945 to the present, and how this pollution has sharply increased since the U.S. introduced depleted uranium (DU) weapons to the battlefields for the first time with the 1991 Persian Gulf War. This, she says, has caused a world epidemic of cancer, diabetes, neuro-muscular diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, diseases of the heart and brain and infertility.

A U.S. nuclear weapons lab whistle blower, Moret has spoken in 46 countries as she feels it is her obligation to share the devastating results of her research, which she began after working at two nuclear weapons laboratories in California from the 1970s to 1991. What she has to say will not only shock, but also answer the question we have always asked: why are so many people suffering from cancer and unexplained diseases of the heart, brain and nervous system these days?”

Heyoka Magazine: Aishah Ali’s interview with geoscientist Leuren Moret

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

March 20, 2008 / TiamatsVision

In an attempt to shake off a major case of cabin fever, I went to my local botanic gardens to take a walk. In their exhibition building was a pictoral showing of “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” created by renown architect Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie. This is an amazing piece of work and I was blown away with it’s concept and design.

“This book tells the story of one of the most original and important gardens of the 21st century, created by the internationally celebrated architectural critic and designer Charles Jencks. He and his late wife started working on a landscape, that, after her death in 1995, continued to grow into a larger project, an ongoing speculation on the basic elements of nature. Covering thirty acres in the Borders area of Scotland, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is conceived as a place to explore certain fundamental aspects of the universe.

What are atoms made of and how should we conceive of them? How does DNA make up a living organism and why is it essential to celebrate it in a garden? In dialogue with eminent physicists, cosmologists, and biologists, including Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, and Steven Rose, Charles Jencks has created a series of new, expansive, visual metaphors that challenge misleading and frequently misunderstood concepts, such as the ‘Big Bang’ and the ‘Selfish Gene.’

(Preview of the book “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” via Google Books)

(Charles Jencks website. Article on “The Garden of Cosmic Speculation” via Recreating Eden)

“God helmet”?…yeah…right…

March 13, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“A “neurotheology” researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the “God Helmet” lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it’s much more interesting than that.Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger’s helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in various published papers this stimulation has been shown to induce a “sensed presence”, under blinded conditions.

There is controversy around these findings: some people have tried to replicate them, although not using exactly the same methods, and got different results. But however improbable or theologically offensive you might find his evidence, because it is published and written up in full, you can try to replicate it for yourself and find out whether it works. In fact, you really can try this at home: the kit needed to make a God Helmet is fabulously rudimentary.”

(via Pure Pedantry)

Nanowires Prefer Deep Purple

March 12, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Silicon nanowires grow more densely when blasted with Deep Purple than any other music tested, says an Australian researcher. But the exact potential of music in growing nanowires remains a little hazy. David Parlevliet, a PhD student at Murdoch University in Perth, presented his findings at a recent Australian Research Council Nanotechnology Network symposium in Melbourne. Parlevliet is testing nanowires for their ability to absorb sunlight in the hope of developing solar cells from them.

[..] Parlevliet says one day his supervisor wondered what would happen if the usual method of generating the pulsed plasma was replaced with music instead. After a very long morning in the lab listening to the radio waiting for nanowires to grow, Parlevliet says he worked out a way to investigate the matter.

“Instead of using the pulse from the pulse generator, I plugged the music player in,” he says. Parlevliet tested the effect of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’, Chopin’s ‘Nocturne Opus 9 No 1′, Josh Abrahams’ ‘Addicted to Bass’, Rammstein’s ‘Das Modell’ and ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’.”

(via ABC Online)

The placebo effect is real apparently even when you know it’s a placebo

March 6, 2008 / Fell

Via kottke.org: The placebo effect is real apparently even when you know it’s a placebo, and, alternately, the possibility exists that cultural expectations of whether a drug works or not may have an effect on how well the drug works:

There are various possible interpretations of this finding: it’s possible, of course, that it was a function of changing research protocols. But one possibility is that the older drug became less effective after new ones were brought in, because of deteriorating medical belief in it.

Via me: Which reminded me if this insightful tidbit on chaos magic, by Mark Defrates:

Chaos Magick focuses on the mechanism of belief, and suggests that the process of belief rather than the object of belief is the critical element in magick.

Go think about that.

Could Superman’s X-Ray Vision Really Exist?

March 3, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane’s underwear in Superman 1 – more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled “On the plausibility of superman’s x-ray vision”. But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman’s amazing seeing through underwear powers.”

(via Of Two Minds)

Cannibalism May Have Wiped Out Neanderthals

February 28, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“A Neanderthal-eat-Neanderthal world may have spread a mad cow-like disease that weakened and reduced populations of the large Eurasian human, thereby contributing to its extinction, according to a new theory based on cannibalism that took place in more recent history. Aside from illustrating that consumption of one’s own species isn’t exactly a healthy way to eat, the new theoretical model could resolve the longstanding mystery as to what caused Neanderthals, which emerged around 250,000 years ago, to disappear off the face of the Earth about 30,000 years ago.

“The story of Neanderthal extinction is one of the most intriguing in all of human evolution,” author Simon Underdown told Discovery News. “Why did a large-brained, intelligent hominid that shared so many traits with us disappear?” To resolve that question, Underdown, a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, studied a well-documented tribal group, the Fore of Papua New Guinea, who practiced ritualistic cannibalism. ”

(via Discovery News)

Flouoride May Damage Brain

February 27, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“It is not clear that the benefits of adding fluoride to drinking water outweigh risks of neurodevelopment or other effects such as dental fluorosis, according to an Institute for Children’s Environmental Health report. Fluoride chemicals are added to two-thirds of U.S. public water supplies ostensibly to reduce tooth decay. Fluoride is found in dental products, supplements and virtually all foods and beverages.

“Excessive fluoride ingestion is known to lower thyroid hormone levels, which is particularly critical for women with subclinical hypothyroidism; decreased maternal thyroid levels adversely affect fetal neurodevelopment,” reports a prestigious committee of scientists and health professionals in a Scientific Consensus Statement on Environmental Agents Associated with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Studies they reviewed and others link fluoride to brain abnormalities and/or IQ deficits.”

(via WYTV)

Brain Waves Pattern Themselves After Rhythms of Nature

February 24, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“The same rules of physics that govern molecules as they condense from gas to liquid, or freeze from liquid to solid, also apply to the activity patterns of neurons in the human brain. University of Chicago mathematician Jack Cowan offered this and related insights on the physics of brain activity last week in Boston during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“Structures built from a very large number of units can exhibit sharp transitions from one state to another state, which physicists call phase transitions,’ said Cowan, a Professor in Mathematics and Neurology at Chicago, before the meeting.

‘Strange and interesting things happen in the neighborhood of a phase transition.’ When liquids undergo phase transitions, they evaporate into gas or freeze into ice. When the brain undergoes a phase transition, it moves from random to patterned activity. ‘The brain at rest produces random activity,’ Cowan said, or what physicists call ‘Brownian motion.’ Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.”

(via Alternative Approaches)

Medical Mystery: Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome

February 24, 2008 / TiamatsVision

If you thought “Grey’s Anatomy” writers invented Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), think again. PSAS, identified and named just six years ago, remains a mysterious condition that thousands of women wish they didn’t have. They are constantly on the edge of orgasm regardless of time, place or circumstance. And while this situation might sound desirable, funny or just plain weird it is actually akin to being a prisoner: a nightmarish reality where a woman’s body acts independently of her own desires.

Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a professor of surgery at UC San Diego and the head of the Sexual Health Program at Alvarado Hospital, is one of the few researchers studying it. “It’s spontaneous, intrusive, and unwanted genital arousal – consisting of throbbing, pulsing or tingling without the person’s sexual interest or desire,” Dr. Goldstein said.”

(via ABC News)

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