A new figure in humanity’s history emerged last week when archaeologists announced the discovery of what could be one of the world’s oldest known spiritual figures. After years of meticulous excavation just miles from Israel’s Mediterranean coast, scientists from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unearthed a 12,000-year-old grave that held the remains of a diminutive "shaman" woman. Buried alongside the woman’s small, huddled corpse were selected pieces of animal bone, a cowtail, an eagle wing, the foot of another human, and, most curiously, some fifty tortoise shells deliberately arranged around the woman’s body — all tell-tale signs, experts say, of her lofty social status at the time. "This is something very special; it stands apart," says Leore Grosman, the project’s lead archaeologist.

TIME

A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth

Few things on Earth are spookier than viruses. The very name virus, from the Latin word for “poisonous slime,” speaks to our lowly regard for them. Their anatomy is equally dubious: loose, tiny envelopes of molecules—protein-coated DNA or RNA—that inhabit some netherworld between life and nonlife. Viruses do not have cell membranes, as bacteria do; they are not even cells. They seem most lifelike only when they invade and co-opt the machinery of living cells in order to make more of themselves, often killing their hosts in the process. Their efficiency at doing so ranks them among the most fearsome killers: Ebola virus, HIV, smallpox, flu. Yet they go untouched by antibiotics, having nothing really biotic about them.

Now, with the recent discovery of a truly monstrous virus, scientists are again casting about for how best to characterize these spectral life-forms. The new virus, officially known as Mimivirus (because it mimics a bacterium), is a creature “so bizarre,” as The London Telegraph described it, “and unlike anything else seen by scientists . . . that . . . it could qualify for a new domain in the tree of life.” Indeed, Mimivirus is so much more genetically complex than all previously known viruses, not to mention a number of bacteria, that it seems to call for a dramatic redrawing of the tree of life.

“This thing shows that some viruses are organisms that have an ancestor that was much more complex than they are now,” says Didier Raoult, one of the leaders of the research team at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France, that identified the virus. “We have a lot of evidence with Mimivirus that the virus phylum is at least as old as the other branches of life and that viruses were involved very early on in the evolutionary emergence of life.”

That represents a radical change in thinking about life’s origins: Viruses, long thought to be biology’s hitchhikers, turn out to have been biology’s formative force.

Discover Magazine

In a unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the court said the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act protects the church, a 130-member branch of a Brazilian denomination. The justices upheld a preliminary injunction barring federal prosecution of church leaders.

Roberts, ruling in his first religious-freedom case, rejected the Bush administration’s contention that only a categorical ban on the substance would adequately prevent abuse and diversion to non-religious use.

``The government’s argument echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I’ll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions,’’ Roberts wrote. He said Congress instead required ``striking sensible balances between religious liberty and competing prior governmental interests.’’

Bloomberg

BBC Radio 4 has a 20 minute program on the use of LSD in psychological treatment:

In the 50’s LSD was widely used to treat psychiatric illness but in the 70’s it was banned for clinical use and became a class A drug in the UK . Now some psychiatrists are arguing for it to be reintroduced in psychiatric treatment. You and Yours investigates.

In other LSD news, Erowid has posted a lot of media from the 2006 LSD Symposium.

The LSD Symposium “Problem Child and Wonder Drug”, held in Basel Switzerland January 13th-15th, 2006 was an enormous success. It was held on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the man who first synthesized and ingested LSD. There were over 2,000 total attendees, dozens of speakers (including Albert Hofmann) and a strong showing from the world press.

Erowid participated in the conference as a patron and media partner. Earth and Fire gave a talk on Saturday titled “Current Views of Acid: What do LSD Users Say?” in which they presented the results of a series of surveys they conducted on the Erowid.org website asking questions about people’s use and views of LSD.

We are hoping to provide a space for people to share their experiences from the symposium with those who were unable to attend. If you attended the conference and have photos, recordings, comments, or conference reviews you’d like to share, please consider submitting them here. We will be putting together a public archive of the event from these submissions.