digimills

and it’s got cancer. A rather cool way to raise awareness actually. I know I’m eating better after looking at that patch of advanced cancer.

Visit the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation for more info.

My alma mater may be hooking us all up with a little more free time.

Using a ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation instrument’ Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, produced slow waves typical of deep sleep in volunteers.

“Theoretically, creating slow brain waves on demand could lead to a magnetically stimulated “power nap,” which might confer the benefit of eight hours sleep in just a few hours.”

Combine this with the 5-day weekend or the 4-hour work week and you’ll have a ton of time to sit on the couch and watch tv!

link

“The idea is that you immerse your feet, hands or, if you are brave enough, your entire body in a warm pool that swarms with hundreds of hungry minnow-sized feeders. The fish zoom in on your most crusty, flaky or scabby skin and chomp away at it to reveal the fresh layer beneath. According to the spas and their enthusiasts, you emerge refreshed, healthy, buffed and glowing.”

link (via ilovethisworld)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is on the horizon.

“Researchers have created a drug that wipes out a single, specific memory in rats. They trained the rats to be scared of a specific tone, as they always got shocked when they heard it, but after given the drug they ceased to be afraid of the sound.”

link (via gizmodo)

Kevin Lafferty, whom I never had the pleasure of working with in my former life as a USGS biologist, has added to the evidence that cats are making us lose our minds. Another study shows the little bastards are increasing the number of males born, all via the Toxoplasma gondii parasite.

“U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kevin Lafferty has linked high rates of toxoplasmosis infection in 39 countries with elevated incidences of neuroticism, suggesting the mind-altering organism may be affecting the cultures of nations.”

“The normal sex ratio is 104 boys born for every 100 girls, but in women with high levels of antibodies against the parasite, the ratio was 260 boys for every 100 girls.”

link (via boingboing)

see also: Feeding stray cats should be an arrestable offense

The paperback version of Game of Shadows comes out this week. It includes a new afterword which details Barry Bonds’ freakish growth, size changes include:

42 to size 52 jersey
10.5 to size 13 cleats
7 1/8 to 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head

As Tom Verducci writes “baseball remains hostage to the ill will Bonds generates…the stench of stagnation is everywhere.” Progress may come in the form of Bonds be indicted for perjury in the next six months.

link

“Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.”

Apparently China’s Jan. 11 test of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments didn’t help matters either…

link (via orbitcast)

Proctology exams are recommended at age 40 for men? Doctors, you have 12 years to get this pill completed…

link (via medgadget)

Petr Janata, a neuroscientist at the UC Davis, just received a $1 million grant to figure out “why listening to music, and achieving that state of being in the musical groove, is such a heady experience.”

“People talk about feeling connected with everything, or that there’s a sense of timelessness or profound joy in both music and spiritual experiences,” says Janata. “You compare those descriptions, whether they’re the same with music as with something else, and then as a neuroscientist, I view the brain mechanism. If I can show the same part of the brain being modulated in these different contexts, then there’s no difference at the neuroscience level, and the experiences are the same, regardless of the language that one lays on it.”

Since The Grateful Dead are no more, Janata plans on using The String Cheese Incident for the study, but their status is in limbo as a member just announced he’ll be leaving the band.

And drugs will be left out of the study:

“While it’s true a lot of people have profound experiences that are drug-related, it’s not that way for everyone,” says Janata. “You can find lots of people that into the groove purely through the music, with nothing but a bottle of water in their hands.”

link

The folks at myscienceproject.org tested everything from donuts and legos to the traditional foam cozy.

“Conclusions: All of our food-based can cozies worked to some degree, but the Rice Krispies Treat cozy stole the show. We theorize that its superior insulating ability probably comes from the thickness of the material combined with the Styrofoam-like quality of the Rice Krispies Treats. And as gratifying as it would have been to see a successful synergy between beer and donuts, the bagels were slightly better insulators, perhaps because they are denser than the raised glazed pastries.”

link (via particlepeople.com)