The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired. The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans. Siegel said that orexin A is unique in that it only had an impact on sleepy monkeys, not alert ones, and that it is "specific in reversing the effects of sleepiness" without other impacts on the brain.

Adding more processing cores to a CPU should have been a relatively painless evolution of computer technology but it turned out to be a real pain in the ass, programming wise. Why? To understand the problem, we must go back to the very beginning of the computer age, close to a hundred and fifty years ago, when an Englishman named Charles Babbage designed the world's first general purpose computer, the analytical engine. Babbage was a mathematician and like most mathematicians of his day, he longed for a time when he would be freed from the tedium of performing long calculation sequences. All he wanted was a reasonably fast calculator that could reliably execute mathematical sequences or algorithms. The idea of using a single fast central processor to emulate the behaviors of multiple small parallel processors was the furthest thing from his mind. Indeed, the very first program written for the analytical engine by Babbage's friend and fellow mathematician, Lady Ada Lovelace, was a table of instructions meant to calculate the Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers. Neither Babbage nor Lady Ada should be faulted for this but current modern computers are still based on Babbage's sequential model. Is it any wonder that the computer industry is having such a hard time making the transition from sequential to parallel computing?

According to my interpretation of the Biblical texts, the cerebellum is a supervised automaton. It is trained by the motor cortex to take over certain routine motor tasks whenever the basal ganglia and motor cortex are busy reasoning internally or engaging in some other motor activity. My understanding of the metaphorical messages to the church of Pergamum (Broca's area) and Laodicea (cerebellum) in the book of Revelation is that speech is always an attentional or volitional (as opposed to automatic) process that involves corrective feedback from the basal ganglia. The cerebellum is not directly involved in processing speech and language. The indication is that the cerebellum can have motor control over the entire body except the mouth, throat and tongue muscles. This means that activities like eating, chewing and swallowing are also excluded from cerebellar control.

The victim of police brutality was a motorist named Jared Massey. Mr. Massey was pulled over on a Utah highway for allegedly speeding. When Mr. Massey asked the officer why he was being pulled over, and then to help him understand why he was accused of speeding before he signed the ticket, the officer ordered him to exit the vehicle. Mr. Massey was then asked to turn around and put his hands behind his back. Mr. Massey began walking back towards the car, obviously confused as to why he was being ordered to put his hands behind his back, and less than 10 seconds later was tased.