Humans infected with Toxoplasma gondii are more prone to risk taking, apparently having more car accidents, for example. Infected mice lose all fear of predators and will happily walk right up to a cat. It was thought that humans could only be infected by contact with cat feces, but thousands were exposed in Victoria BC through a contaminated water supply. Untested so far is the legal culpability of someone who carries the parasite if they are accused of a crime.

Christopher Handley, a 39 year old comics and Manga collector in Iowa pled guilty in 2009 to an offense under the Protect Act after a shipment of comics he sourced from Japan was opened by customs. He was sentenced to 6 months in prison. With real child pornography real children are abused in the making of the film. The extension of the prohibition to virtual children criminalizes the communication of bad thoughts but the same holds for other types of material, possession of the Anarchist's Cookbook for example. There are lots examples in Labor history of union organizers being arrested for distributing pamphlets. So criminalizing the communication of ideas is not new. The question is where to draw the line.

The article was written by a news service reporter who took a complex issue and boiled it down into 156 words. Such articles routinely garble the information, partly in an attempt to make it sexier. The original in the American Journal of Medicine is behind a paywall. of course, but no such article showed up in their search results. No doubt it's somewhere, safely hidden from the public who are affected by the issue. The use of the word sugar is misleading, because there are different kinds of sugar. The kind alleged to be the most damaging is fructose, which your body is unable to metabolize properly. Fructose is said to be linked to diabetes, alzheimers and a wide variety of other diseases. Fructose is in just about all processed foods now, (I found it listed on a can of cat food). There's a good chance that the sugar industry will eventually find themselves in the same boat as the tobacco industry, but it will likely take decades .

The change Malala has been working for essentially means the total destruction of the underpinnings of the culture of northern Pakistan. That's why conservatives in Pakistan and elsewhere fight. We are no more right to impose our social system on other cultures that we were in past centuries to impose our religion. Along with local cultures hundreds of languages are disappearing. This is a time of mass extinction of species of animals, plants, fish and human diversity. These changes are as unstoppable as they are catastrophic. It's grotesque to see so many cheering it on.

Thanks to heavy marketing, serotonin uptake inhibitors were wildly successful when they first appeared. After a few years that success fizzled out. Many, many studies have established that the placebo effect is extremely powerful. The money drug manufacturers shovel into promotion is also at work in another important way. Researchers who get the right results get invited to speak at conferences in exotic countries, where they are put up in 5 star hotels and offered the finest food and women. Their research is underwritten and they are offered high paying prestigious positions. So it pays to get the right result.

One major problem is our weak laws about lobbying. Lobbyists can wine and dine MPs constantly with little oversight. Even worse, if an MP votes the right way they can get a great job with the PR company when they leave office. So... vote for the spy bill, retire before the next election and immediately start work as Vice President for SFA at a salary of half a million a year. Canadian News media are being corrupted in the same way.

The true situation is that the brain is designed to find patterns and assign agency. "Free will"... behind all decisions large and small lies emotional processing. Few of us could watch a good horror movie and not feel tension. Last figures I've seen have 41% of americans believing in ESP, 37% in haunted houses, 32% in ghosts, etc, etc... The exploitation of irrational feelings is the foundation of the powerful Public Relations campaigns that lead us into flocking to buy iPhones or supporting wars. The irrational is at the core of all Art, Music and Poetry, and without it we would no longer be human.

Prayer, meditation... it all boils down to thumb sucking.

The approach locks understanding of alzheimers to body chemistry and that's certainly one component, but there are other elements that go unaddressed. In western nuclear families children grow up and move elsewhere and the elderly often end up living alone. Exclusion and isolation are painful and severe punishments, particularly for women. Elderly women typically fret constantly about their sons, daughters and grandchildren, whom they are lucky to see once a month. In this position little else seems important, and that which is unimportant is deleted from memory. Knitting classes, Bridge clubs and TV are wholly inadequate substitutes... Drug companies would have us believe that the answer to all problems is a drug, and the tunnel vision that produces blinds us to other important causes of the condition.

Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Some people who lose their vision report florid visual hallucinations, and anyone who spends a day wearing a blindfold is likely to experience them as well. We assume that we see with our eyes, but the eyes are only the start point. The brain takes the raw information feed and constructs our visual reality for us. When you're dreaming that system is constructing a visual reality disconnected from the usual input from the eyes. The majority of theories we hear about the nature of dreams suffer from a profound ignorance about how visual information is processed.

We'll be seeing a lot more of this, marketed as a cool new feature. Everyone makes about 250,000 saccades per day and the vast majority are unconsciously generated. By logging saccade targets one can easily map a person's interests, tastes, fears, sexual orientation, etc. Instead of page views ad companies will be selling saccade targets. That's bad enough, but the NSA will be collecting information about you that you don't even know yourself. With enough effort it would be possible to generate user profiles and identify users soley by their saccade fingerprints.

The big question is...how would China have confined the malware to the US? Such an infection would wipe them out as well, and likely faster. China is awash in pirated copies of Windows that don't update. The report is just pure propaganda aimed at the technically ignorant.

"just changes the way the traits already encoded"... That would mean there'd be a pre-existing definition of the scent of cherry blossoms, which seems unlikely. There are already hard coded aversions to heights, teeth, staring eyes, etc, but this reaction is to one of billions of innocuous stimulae. More likely, the system would read the definition of cherry blossom scent from the amygdala together with it's threat assessment tag and add it to the presets. This appears to be a brilliant evolutionary shortcut so I'd be wary until the results are proven to be reliable.

"you can't argue correlation-but-not-causation"... If you're assuming that the Art was the cause you can. The Art is only one part of the experience and the context it's presented in is likely much more significant. The context conveys it's importance and it's association with wealth. In some ways it mimics the environment in a church, where people speak in hushed tones. It would be useful to put the same paintings in a thrift store, march another group of kids round and then do the same tests later. Or put truly garbage Art on the museum walls and do the same tests.

Einstein also had a bigger nose than most people. The brain is far more complex than painted here, having more connections than there are stars in the universe. While there are specialized modules, thinking is a committee activity and it turns out that almost all decisions are not made rationally but emotionally, with your consciousness being informed moments later ...all the while believing it is in control. If Einstein had only had the rational going for him he would never have found anything of note... Niels Bohr had a dream in 1913 of electrons whirling around a nucleus, woke up and wrote it all down. That dream is the basis of atomic theory. The ability to pull together disparate threads to make something new is now suspected to be the work of the associative cortex... but still in collaboration with all the other committee members that make up the brain.