“Make the injury,” Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It’s 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her blood within moments. Heart rate and blood pressure plummet. Don’t worry – Alam and Duggan are going to save her.
Alam goes to work on the chest, removing part of a rib to reveal the heart, a throbbing, shiny pink ball the size of a fist. He cuts open the aorta – an even more lethal injury – and blood sprays all over our scrubs. The EKG flatlines. The surgeons drain the remaining blood and connect tubes to the aorta and other vessels, filling the circulatory system with chilled organ-preservation fluid – a nearly frozen daiquiri of salts, sugars, and free-radical scavengers.
Her temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit; brain activity has ceased. Alam checks the wall clock and asks a nurse to mark the time: 11:25 am.
But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead – the common term for her state is, believe it or not, suspended animation. Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems). Trauma surgeons can’t wait – saving people with serious wounds, like gunshots, is always a race against the effects of blood loss. When blood flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes of low oxygen levels causes brain death.
wired
MEXICO CITY – Hundreds of thousands of protesters marched through the Mexican capital on Sunday to demand a manual recount in the disputed presidential election, led by a leftist candidate who says fraud cost him the presidency.
As a precaution, the Roman Catholic Church canceled Mass at the city’s downtown cathedral as supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador began to overwhelm the central plaza to the sound of firecrackers and bands. Police officials in the pro-Lopez Obrador city government estimated the crowd at 900,000.
Conservative candidate Felipe Calderon, of President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party, won by about 244,000 votes in the official count after the July 2 election.
Lopez Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party has appealed to the federal electoral court to overturn the official count, alleging illicit government and corporate help for Calderon, ballot stuffing and other irregularities. The former Mexico City mayor says he will stop the protests only if there is a ballot-by-ballot recount.
National Action has also filed its own challenges, seeking to stretch Calderon’s tiny vote advantage. Calderon has said he believes is no legal basis for a complete recount, and has called on Lopez Obrador to respect official vote tallies
Without realizing it, people will perceive things according to how they want to see them, a new study suggests.
“There is an age old hypothesis in psychology that a person’s wishes, hopes and desires can influence what they see,” said David Dunning, Cornell University psychologist and co-author of the study. “This theory had lay dormant for about 40 years, though, without any supporting evidence. We wanted to test the murky waters again.”
In five separate tests conducted by Dunning and a graduate student, Emily Balcetis, 412 volunteers from Cornell were presented with an ambiguous picture that could be interpreted as two distinct figures—either a horse’s head or the body of a seal, for example. They were told they would be assigned to a taste test of either fresh-squeezed orange juice or a gelatinous, clumpy and rather unappealing veggie smoothie, depending on whether they saw a farm animal or sea creature.
More often than not the participants chose the figure that would lead them to the juice.
LiveScience
Scientists at The University of Manchester have created a virtual computer world designed to test telepathic ability.
The system, which immerses an individual in what looks like a life-size computer game, has been created as part of a joint project between The University’s School of Computer Science and School of Psychological Sciences.
Approximately 100 participants will take part in the experiment which aims to test whether telepathy exists between individuals using the system. The project will also look at how telepathic abilities may vary depending on the relationships which exist between participants.
The test is carried out using two volunteers who could be friends, work colleagues or family. They are placed in separate rooms on different floors of the same building to eliminate any possibility of communication.
Participants enter the virtual environment by donning a head-mounted 3D display and an electronic glove which they use to navigate their way through the computer generated world.
Once inside participants view a random selection of computer-generated objects. These include a telephone, a football and an umbrella. The person in the first room sees one object at a time, which they are asked to concentrate on and interact with.
The person in the other room is simultaneously presented with the same object plus three decoy objects. They are then asked to select the object they believe the other participant is trying to transmit to them.
science blog
There was the time a fifth grader thought it would be funny to punch the blind kid and run. So he snuck up on Ben Underwood and hit him in the face. That’s when Ben started his clicking thing. “I chased him, clicking until I got to him, then I socked him a good one,” says Ben, a skinny 14-year-old. “He didn’t reckon on me going after him. But I can hear walls, parked cars, you name it. I’m a master at this game.”
Ask people about Ben Underwood and you’ll hear dozens of stories like this – about the amazing boy who doesn’t seem to know he’s blind. There’s Ben zooming around on his skateboard outside his home in Sacramento; there he is playing kickball with his buddies. To see him speed down hallways and make sharp turns around corners is to observe a typical teen – except, that is, for the clicking. Completely blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes (he now wears two prostheses), Ben has learned to perceive and locate objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then listening for the echoes as they bounce off the surfaces around him. About as loud as the snapping of fingers, Ben’s clicks tell him what’s ahead: the echoes they produce can be soft (indicating metals), dense (wood) or sharp (glass). Judging by how loud or faint they are, Ben has learned to gauge distances.
people
Meerkat pups do not learn how to eat dangerous animals such as scorpions on their own but are taught by adults, scientists have discovered.
Researchers found that adults bring dead animals to the youngest pups.
As pups get older, helpers disable live prey for them; finally they coax the youngsters to hunt for themselves.
Writing in the journal Science, the scientists suggest meerkats are only the second non-human animal species found to teach its young actively.
The only other clear demonstration of teaching behaviour in species other than Homo sapiens is, they say, the finding reported earlier this year that ants can help their fellows locate food.
bbc
A man paralyzed from the neck down by knife injuries sustained five years ago can now check his email, control a robot arm and even play computer games using the power of thought alone, according to John Donoghue of Brown University, who led the work reported in Nature.
Electrodes implanted in Matt Nagle’s brain measure the neural signals generated when he concentrates on trying to move one of his paralysed limbs. Software trained to recognize different patterns of neural activity then translates imagined gestures into the movement of an on-screen cursor or a robotic arm.
In the same issue of Nature, Krishna Shenoy and colleagues at Stanford University report a way to dramatically boost the efficiency of brain implants in monkeys. Using software that predicts the monkey’s intention from only the first few bursts of neural activity, the animals’ implants were able to function four times faster than normal—a rate that could enable a paralyzed person to type 15 words per minute.
new scientist
Psilocybin, the active ingredient of “magic mushrooms,” expands the mind. After a thousand years of use, that’s now scientifically official.
The chemical promoted a mystical experience in two-thirds of people who took it for the first time, according to a new study. One-third rated a session with psilocybin as the “single most spiritually significant” experience of their lives. Another third put it in the top five.
The study, published online today in the journal Psychopharmacology, is the first randomized, controlled trial of a substance used for centuries in Mexico and Central America to produce mystical insights. Almost no research on a psychedelic drug in human subjects has been done in this country since the 1960s. It confirms what both shamans and hippies have long said—taking psilocybin is a scary, reality-bending and occasionally life-changing experience.
washington post
SAO PAULO, Brazil—A grouping of granite blocks along a grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical observatory _ a find archaeologists say indicates early rainforest inhabitants were more sophisticated than previously believed.
The 127 blocks, some as high as 9 feet tall, are spaced at regular intervals around the hill, like a crown 100 feet in diameter.
On the shortest day of the year _ Dec. 21 _ the shadow of one of the blocks, which is set at an angle, disappears.
“It is this block’s alignment with the winter solstice that leads us to believe the site was once an astronomical observatory,” said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute. “We may be also looking at the remnants of a sophisticated culture.”
Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Columbian Indians in the Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected.
Washington Post
Mice appear to empathize with pain in other critters they’re familiar with, a capacity previously thought to exist only in higher primates.
When mice saw others they knew showing pain, they responded with signs of empathy, such as staying close by, according to a new study.
The mice seem hardwired to form a lower type of empathy called “emotional contagion,” said Jeffrey Mogil, a McGill University geneticist, who led the study appearing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
The contagious effect isn’t triggered by conscious kindness. It’s more like the way someone’s yawn prompts someone nearby to do the same.
cbc news
German car giant Volkswagen has turned fiction into reality by unveiling a fully automatic car which really can drive itself – and at speeds of up to 150mph.
It can weave with tyres screeching around tricky bends and chicanes, and through tightly coned off tracks – without any help or intervention from a human.
The remarkable car is the VW Golf GTi ‘53 plus 1’ codenamed after the number ‘53’ which Herbie carried when racing in his big screen adventures.
The GTi has electronic ‘eyes’ that use radar and laser sensors in the grille to ‘read’ the road and send the details back to its computer brain. A sat-nav system tracks its exact position with pin-point precision to within an inch.
daily mail
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