Abstracts of scientific research papers investigating the absence or presence of psychedelic tryptamines in psychiatrically labelled and psychiatrically unlabelled populations, including speculations on the significance of findings, emphasizing the usual pathological paradigm.

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"If you have to inoculate yourself against the various memes of closure that are around, psychedelics do that. That's why they are so politically controversial and potent because -- more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake -- they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning. "

~ Terence McKenna

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2003: The year in technology

2003: The year in biology and medicine

2003: The year in space and astronomy

BBC Novelty Report

Berkely Novelty Report

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by Terence McKenna

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Studies by Professor Benjamin Libet at University of California San Francisco in the late 1970's on awake neurosurgery patients suggested that the brain refers information "backwards in time". Simple activities like the sensation of walking (seeing and feeling your feet hit the pavement) may also involve backwards time referral.

Vision of your feet hitting pavement should occur well before the sensory feel of your feet touching the pavement because of conduction times and synaptic delays through the long nerves and spinal cord from your feet, yet we perceive seeing and feeling as simultaneous. So, either a) the "fast" visual information is delayed, b) the sight and feel are experienced separately, but remembered as simultaneous, or c) the slow information is referred "backwards in time" (from the near future) to match the fast information.

:: po§ted by valis @ 29.12.03 :: §end :: ::

In the sci-fi thriller Paycheck, an engineer has his memory erased after completing a sensitive job.

Scientific American.com spoke with a leading neurobiologist to find out just how close scientists are to controlling recall.

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The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement.

The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently "causing" them to produce non-random patterns.

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{via Technoccult}

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"Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become."

Edward O. Wilson
Consilience, The Unity of Knowledge

:: po§ted by valis @ 27.12.03 :: §end :: ::

MP3 Recordings of Alex, Allyson, and Zena Grey's conversation
at Palenque Norte (Burning Man) 2003

It was hot. It was dusty. It was Friday, and it was noon in the desert. But that didn't prevent the Palenque Norte conversation with the Grey's from being one of the best-attended daytime events of Burning Man 2003.

After a spectacular Thursday night of revelry, when the citizens of Black Rock City would normally still be asleep, a small crowd began to form Aetheria Village's lecture pod. By noon the pod was packed, bicycles and people filled the village's common areas, and several art-cars were parked within range of our sound system.

Later we were told that additional hundreds listened to the Grey's on KPOD, our village radio station. For many of this year's burners, it was one of their most talked-about events.

Now, those of you who couldn't attend this wonderful presentation can hear it in the comfort of your home (or wherever your Internet connection is :-).

{ www.alexgrey.com }

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A new method for quantitatively measuring the compatibility of materials with living tissues has been developed by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

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Scientists have put forward a conceptual model to account for seemingly inexplicable events such as coincidences and occurrences of 'psi. Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, joined forces with Princeton University professor Robert Jahn to explore anomalous regions of psychology, neuroscience and physics.

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The word ‘meme’ was first popularly used by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. The word ‘meme’ has come to mean a cultural accretion of knowledge, a package of several ideas that can be passed onto others. It’s usually more complex than a single idea, and can represent a fashion/music/lifestyle or a belief. It is the mental equivalent of a gene whereby a package of many attributes is passed on.

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In 2003, new evidence cemented the bizarre idea that the universe is made mostly of mysterious "dark matter," being stretched apart by an unknown force called "dark energy." This set of discoveries claims top honors as the Breakthrough of the Year, named by Science and its publisher, AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

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The average person will spend 50,000 hours of his life dreaming -- more than two hours a night, every night. For an activity that consumes so much of our time, however, scientists still don't completely understand why we dream or what dreams mean.

In this five-part series, "In Your Dreams," the Post-Gaztte provides the latest information and newest theories on dreaming. We talked to dozens of sleep researchers and dream experts from around the nation, as well as everyday people who are fascinated by the subject and keep track of their dreams in elaborate journals. Our goal: To shed as much light as we could on the mysteries of the night.

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Physicists say they have brought light to a complete halt for a fraction of a second and then sent it on its way, an achievement that could someday help scientists develop powerful new computers.

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Animals with an innate phobia of novelty have higher levels of stress hormones after a new experience and die significantly younger than their braver kin, new research has found.

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You may have heard of the "book of life", but this is the real thing. An encyclopedia has been published that contains 172 pages of mouse DNA, including all 60,000 known active mouse genes.

Work on a human equivalent has already begun, promising the ultimate in vanity publishing - anyone rich enough could one day pay to have their genome committed to print.

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In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

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A new study shows that general relativity, a theory in which observers in different reference frames measure time differently, is not incompatible with chaos theory, in which events unfold in absolute time.

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The Heliodisplay projects full color streaming video into free space (i.e. air). It is plug-and-play compatible with most video sources (TV, DVD, computer, etc.).

These non-holographic images can be fully interactive, allowing a hand or finger to select, navigate and manipulate — as if it were a virtual touch screen.

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It may be more than a million years old, but a regime of organic meat, or a leg of game bird, accompanied by fresh leaves, nuts and fruit, washed down with water, is just about perfect for the human body.

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