Author Archive | JacobSloan

Study Suggests “WiFi Sickness” Is Imaginary

By on May 19, 2013 in News 0

wifi sickness

A sizable number of people are convinced that cellphones and wireless internet make them physically ill, and dozens have gone so far as to give up their lives and move to the isolated, signal-free Radio Quiet Zone in the mountains of West Virginia to alleviate the symptoms. Via Inkfish, a recent experiment at King’s College London points to the disease being psychological:

Subjects at put on headband-mounted antennas. They were told that the researchers were testing a “new kind of WiFi,” and that once the signal started they should carefully monitor any symptoms in their bodies. Then the researchers left the room. For 15 minutes, the subjects watched a WiFi symbol flash on a laptop screen.

In reality, there was no WiFi switched on during the experiment. Yet 82 of the 147 subjects—more than half—reported symptoms. Two even asked for the experiment to be stopped early because the effects were too severe to stand.

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Radioactive Goldfish Discovered At Ohio Nuclear Power Plant

By on May 19, 2013 in News 0

radioactive goldfish

No word on an eye count. Russia Today reports:

Two radioactive goldfish were found swimming in a juice pitcher of nuclear reactor water in an underground steam tunnel at an Ohio power plant. Investigators are baffled as to how the radioactive fish remained unnoticed in the ‘secure’ facility.

Investigators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and officials of the plant, which is operated by FirstEnergy Corp., have been looking through surveillance tapes to try to identify who was responsible for leaving the radioactive goldfish in the tunnel on May 2.

The fishy tale has served as an embarrassment for the plant, which has already come under scrutiny for a case in which four contractors were exposed to life-threatening hard radiation in 2011. The plant has also been scutinized for a serious lack of security.

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The Importance Of Using Rituals

By on May 18, 2013 in News 0

rituals work

Scientific American on the mysterious benefit and power behind “irrational” rituals:

Rituals take an extraordinary array of shapes and forms. At times performed in communal or religious settings, at times performed in solitude; at times involving fixed, repeated sequences of actions, at other times not. People engage in rituals with the intention of achieving a wide set of desired outcomes, from reducing their anxiety to boosting their confidence, performing well in a competition – or even making it rain.

Recent research suggests that rituals may be more rational than they appear. Why? Because even simple rituals can be extremely effective. Rituals performed after experiencing losses do alleviate grief, and rituals performed before high-pressure tasks do in fact reduce anxiety and increase people’s confidence. What’s more, rituals appear to benefit even people who claim not to believe that rituals work.

Humans feel uncertain and anxious in a host of situations. In the late 1940s, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski suggested that people are more likely to turn to rituals when they face situations where the outcome is important and uncertain and beyond their control.

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UFO Sightings In Canada Doubled In 2012

By on May 18, 2013 in News 0

ufo sightingsIt is possible that the increase doesn’t mean the are more objects in the sky, but instead reflects people’s shifting relations to technology, superstition, and their surroundings. The Toronto Sun writes:

UFO sightings in Canada are at an all-time high, according to Canadian sky-gazers. The annual report from Ufology Research documented 1,981 UFO sightings in Canada in 2012, more than double 2011′s record 986.

While 40% of Canada’s UFOs were spotted in Ontario, every province save Saskatchewan and P.E.I. saw mysterious lights or objects in the sky.

Among Ufology Research’s theories on the growing phenomenon: “More secret or classified military exercises and overflights are occurring over populated areas; more people are unaware of the nature of conventional or natural objects in the sky; more people are able to report their sightings with easier access to the Internet and portable technology; or even that the downturn in the economy is leading to an increased desire by some people to look skyward for assistance.”

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App Scans Grocery Store Items To Identify Monsanto Products

By on May 17, 2013 in News 0

Identify MonsantoSpecifically intended to point out items linked to the vast and nebulous tentacles of Monsanto and Koch Industries, the smartphone app uncloaks the corporate family tree behind a given barcode. Via Forbes:

The app itself is the work of one Los Angeles-based 26-year-old freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, who has devoted the last 16 months to Buycott.

Pardo’s handiwork is available for download on iPhone or Android, making its debut in early May. You can scan the barcode on any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.

 

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One Quarter Of Britons Say They Are Curious To Try Cannibalism

By on May 17, 2013 in News 0

try cannibalism

A taboo urge lying just below the surface of society, waiting to bubble up? Tabloid the Daily Star reports:

Millions of Brits want to eat human flesh like movie cannibal Hannibal Lecter, a shock report revealed yesterday. Almost a quarter of us reckon we are “curious” to taste human meat – while 14% want a piece of ourselves fried to learn what our own body tastes like.

Even more of those questioned confessed they would be happy to tuck into their own body if a doctor safely took a sample from them.

The findings of the cannibalism poll for telly channel Eden come just days after 40-year-old Brit Geoffrey Portway admitted a US plot to kill and eat a child. He faces up to 27 years in an American jail after law enforcement agents found his home in Massachusetts was equipped with a steel cage and a child-sized homemade coffin.

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Robert Moss On How To Use Active Dreaming

By on May 16, 2013 in News 0

active dreamingLife feeling a bit grey? Sounds True talks to shamanic dream explorer Robert Moss, pioneer of “active dreaming,” who explains the power of dreaming techniques to help yourself and others:

When people think about dreams in our society at all and try to talk about them, they typically talk as if dreaming is a passive activity. You go to sleep and you have a dream or maybe a dream has you.

But we can be active dreamers in a couple of very interesting and important senses. We can learn to be active about entering the dream state—this approach goes beyond the more familiar version of lucid dreaming by teaching us how we can start out conscious or lucid and enter the dream state from that conscious level and stay conscious through the whole experience.

You learn to reenter that dream consciously, go back and find the dream, talk to a character, resolve a problem, go beyond a terror—learn how to use your personal dreams as portals to places of healing and imagination and doorways into the multidimensional universe.

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Did The Internet Destroy The Middle Class?

By on May 16, 2013 in News 0

destroy the middle classVia Salon, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier puts forth his argument that it is so:

The photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. The number of people who are contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same. Instagram wouldn’t work if there weren’t many millions of people using it.

So there’s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is that whereas before when people made contributions to the system that they used, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary but pensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, they receive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economy is like is the economy in a developing country slum. It’s reputation, it’s barter, it’s that kind of stuff.

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Dairy Associations Lobby The FDA To Alter The Definition Of “Milk” To Include Aspartame

By on May 16, 2013 in News 0

definition of "milk"It’s not quite as bad as some have reported – cancer-causing artificial sweetening additives such as as aspartame likely would still need to be listed in tiny letters as ingredients. But the milk could otherwise be packaged, marketed, and sold as just “milk.” The stated goal is to reverse the trend of lagging dairy consumption by children, particularly in school. From the U.S. government’s Federal Register:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is announcing that the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition requesting that the Agency amend the standard of identity for milk and 17 other dairy products to provide for the use of any safe and suitable sweetener as an optional ingredient.

IDFA and NMPF request their proposed amendments to the milk standard of identity to allow optional characterizing flavoring ingredients used in milk to be sweetened with any safe and suitable sweetener—including non-nutritive sweeteners such as aspartame.

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2,300-Year-Old Mayan Pyramid In Belize Bulldozed For Roadway Project

By on May 15, 2013 in News 0

mayan pyramidThe Sydney Morning Herald reports that a private company has demolished key Mayan ruins in order to use the debris to fill potholes:

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project. Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity…they were using this for road fill,” Mr Awe said. “It’s just so horrendous…To think that today you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroy it.”

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