Thursday, 15 September 2011

Civil Disobedience on the Web

Organ music 'instils religious feelings'

People who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by some organ pipes.
Many churches and cathedrals have organ pipes that are so long they emit infrasound which at a frequency lower than 20 Hertz is largely inaudible to the human ear.
But in a controlled experiment in which infrasound was pumped into a concert hall, UK scientists found they could instil strange feelings in the audience at will.
These included an extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and even shivers down the spine.
Sound 'gun'
Infrasound has become the subject of intense study in recent years. Researchers have found that some animals, such as elephants, can communicate with low-frequency calls.
Infrasound can be detected at volcanoes and may provide a way to predict eruptions.
And recent work by some of the scientists involved in this latest study found that hauntings - the feeling that something or someone else unseen is in a room or building - may also be explained by the presence of infrasound.
To test the impact on an audience of extreme bass notes from an organ pipe, researchers constructed a seven-metre-long "infrasonic cannon" which they placed at the back of the Purcell Room, a concert hall in South London.
They then invited 750 people to report their feelings after listening to pieces of contemporary music intermittently laced sound from the cannon, played a 17 Hz at levels of 6-8 decibels.
Feel the bass
The results showed that odd sensations in the audience increased by an average of 22% when the extreme bass was present.
"It has been suggested that because some organ pipes in churches and cathedrals produce infrasound this could lead to people having weird experiences which they attribute to God," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from University of Hertfordshire.
"Some of the experiences in our audience included 'shivering on my wrist', 'an odd feeling in my stomach', 'increased heart rate', 'feeling very anxious', and 'a sudden memory of emotional loss'.
"This was an experiment done under controlled conditions and it shows infrasound does have an impact, and that has implications... in a religious context and some of the unusual experiences people may be having in certain churches."
Sarah Angliss, an engineer and composer in charge of the project, added: "Organ players have been adding infrasound to the mix for 500 years so maybe we're not the first generation to be 'addicted to bass'."
Details of the organ infrasound study are being presented to the British Association's annual science festival, which this year is in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Jonathan Amos @'BBC'

Exposed after eight years: a private eye's dirty work for Fleet Street

Slavoj Žižek on the Marx Brothers

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Humans and Neanderthals had sex, but not very often

Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors spread across the world, having sex with Neanderthals, Denisovans and other groups of ancient humans as they went. Today, our genes testify to these prehistoric liaisons. Last year, when the Neanderthal genome was finally sequenced, it emerged that everyone outside of African can trace 1 and 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
The discovery was a vindication for some and a surprise to others. For decades, palaeontologists had fought over different visions of the rise of early humans. Some championed the “Out of Africa” model, which says that all of us descend from a small group of ancestors who came out of Africa, swept the world, and replaced every other group of early humans. The most extreme versions of this model said that these groups never had sex, or at least, never bred successfully. The alternative – the multiregional model – envisages these prehistoric groups as part of a single population that met and mated extensively.
To an extent, these are caricatured versions of the two models, and there are subtler variants of each. Still, early evidence seemed to support the extreme Out of Africa version. When scientists sequenced the mitochondrial genome of Neanderthals (a small secondary set of genes set apart from the main pack), they found no evidence that any of these sequences had invaded the modern human genome. The conclusion: Neanderthals and humans never bred.
The full Neanderthal genome disproved that idea, but it also shifted the question from whether humans had sex with Neanderthals to just how much sex they had. As I mentioned in New Scientist earlier this year, modern humans were spreading into areas where Neanderthals existed. “It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of sex for genes from a resident population to infiltrate the genomes of colonisers. When an incoming group mates with an established one, the genes they pick up quickly rise to prominence as their population grows.”
Now, Mathias Currat from the University of Geneva and Laurent Excoffier from the University of Berne have weighed into the debate. They simulated the spread of modern humans from Africa and their encounters with Neanderthals throughout Europe and Asia, to work out the levels of sex that would have transferred Neanderthal genes to modern genomes at their current level.
The duo concluded that sex between the two groups was somewhat of a fringe activity. Fewer than 2 percent of the possible sexual encounters at the time happened between a human and a Neanderthal and produced a fertile, healthy hybrid child. That’s a conservative estimate – the true odds might have been even lower. “Such interbreedings were strongly prevented or very rarely successful,” says Excoffier...

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Ed Yong @'Discover'

Frida

I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought, there are so many people in the world; there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true, I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
- Frida Kahlo

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Uppers Rock the World

Methadone maintenance treatment decreases reoffending

Drop Out Orchestra - Mix Session September 2011

Download

01. Gredit - Ben E Slow
02. Lou Teti - Shake (Drop Out Orchestra Reload)
03. Honom - Bedcat
04. Rambla Boys - Cocomero
05. Lou Teti - Love It (Dublin Aunts Rework)
06. Mary Mary - Shackles (Praise You) Drop Out Orchestra Rework
07. Drop Out Orchestra - Ego (Black Strobe Remix)
08. Tronik Youth - Toke-Yo
09. Katzuma - Life In The City
10. Dub On Film (Drop Out Orchestra Rework)
11. Ajello ft Hard Ton - Chocolate Black Leather (Tempelhof Remix)
12. Fabmayday - Disco Verme (Drop Out Orchestra Remix)
13. 3io - Born Slippy

♪♫ SBTRKT - Pharaohs ft. Roses Gabor

Botulism Turning Up In King County Heroin

“In late August, a King County woman with a history of ‘black tar’ heroin injection arrived at a hospital with slurred speech, double vision and drooping eyelids, according to a statement issued Wednesday by Seattle & King County Public Health. About a week later, a man with a similar history of injection drug use was admitted with similar symptoms.
“Both saw their conditions worsen and were admitted to an intensive care unit. Botulism – a life-threatening but rare illness caused by a toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum bacteria – is strongly suspected in both cases, and testing to confirm the diagnosis is pending at a state laboratory.”