Archive for 2010

Cooking, Fire and Human Evolution

Cooking, Fire and Human Evolution
Did Learning to Cook Push Our Ancestors Toward Modernity? // Intriguing evidence shows that cooking may have been the spark that set human evolution blazing toward higher intelligence and civilization. It has long been a fascinating puzzle to scientists: Why did our apelike ancestors come...
July 26th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

Psychedelic Technologies

Psychedelic Technologies
Imagine… you are strolling along the Esplanade at Burning Man, and something catches your eye. Bands of lights are rapidly moving up and down a 30 foot high pyramid, from Red at the bottom, through Orange, Green, Turquoise, Indigo, Violet, and finally White light at the top. Nothing too unusual,...
July 26th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

The Anti-Psychic’s Challenge

The Anti-Psychic’s Challenge
Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world’s psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I’ll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)
July 20th, 2010 | Extended Mind | Read More

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich...
July 20th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World
Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year’s list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails,...
July 13th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

A Ladies’ Man and Shameless

A Ladies’ Man and Shameless
Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan. The eternally feminine leads us forward. – Goethe He who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy, But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise. – William Blake Only connect. – E. M. Forster I‘m finally...
July 13th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Why can’t we stop Believing?

Why can’t we stop Believing?
Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble. As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine,...
July 6th, 2010 | Science of the Mind | Read More

BIG BANG BIG BOOM

BIG BANG BIG BOOM
BLU’s new wall painted animation is an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life … and how it could probably end. direction and animation by BLU blublu.org production and distribution by ARTSH.it artsh.it sountrack by ANDREA MARTIGNONI BIG BAG BIG BOOM – the...
July 6th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

Mutation in key gene allows Tibetans to thrive

Mutation in key gene allows Tibetans to thrive
The gene mutation that enables people to thrive at high altitudes is much more common in Tibetans than Han Chinese and may represent the strongest instance of natural selection ever documented in a human population. From the Guardian, by Cian O’Luanaigh A gene that controls red blood cell production...
July 5th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

(A Brief History and) Motivation of an Entheogenic Chemist

(A Brief History and) Motivation of an Entheogenic Chemist
Abstract: Casey Hardison was arrested spring 2004 for the production of psychedelic-type drugs, i.e., LSD, 2C- B and DMT. In the three years since, not one person from ‘authority’ had bothered to ask him what motivated him to synthesise psychedelic drugs. It was as if the a priori assumption that...
July 5th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More
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