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The Scientific Explanation Thread

less dissolved gases in hot water I believe. leads to easier formation of crystalline structure, perhaps?
 
what is the scientific explamatgion fo bananas ni a curry? VBananas dont belong in curry fucks sake. Explain that bitches!3
 
I'm guessing that curry was eaten with much alcohol too... ;)
 
^ how the fuck did you lnow i was smashed bitches!? this is serious, why the fuck are bananaas ihn curry? Honewstly i cant see a reason besides making it hoerrible and unpalatabklle for us to eat bitches
 
^ No see you can make a good lamb curry with fruits. Its pretty mild but if you put sultanas, apple, bannana and tomato in it turns out really nice. I'm sure you could find a recipe somewhere.
 
YES! you're so right zephyr - just like hawaiian pizza! gross! fruit does not belong on a pizza either
fruit does not belong in any main meal! it's for desserts and desserts only!

-=DLouD247=D-
 
That's pretty cool news xcidium and excellent ammunition for the next time religious types come knocking on my door.

This an (opinion) article from last weeks New Scientist that I found interesting. It's also pretty damn relevant to bluelight.

Things you wouldn't tell your mother: The end of online privacy?

18 September 2006
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues
Alison George


You wouldn't tell a stranger on a bus about your sexual habits, so why do millions of people freely reveal information like this online on social networking sites? Will their openess come back to haunt them? Alison George reports on the end of privacy as we know it.


Cols likes a smoke and has tried many different drugs. He has three piercings and is in the process of tattooing his arm. He earns between $75,000 and $100,000 a year and doesn't see his dad.

I know all about Cols even though I have never met him and probably never shall. Five years ago only a close friend of his would have known such personal details about him. Yet thanks to his profile on the social networking website MySpace, I even know the first thing he thinks about in the morning.

There's nothing unusual about this. Millions of people share some of their most personal details with total strangers on the internet via sites such as MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. The dangers this can pose to children are well publicised, but it also has powerful if less well known implications for us all. The sheer volume of personal information that people are publishing online - and the fact that some of it could remain visible permanently - is changing the nature of personal privacy. Is this a good thing, or will the "MySpace generation" live to regret it?

The change has been made possible by the way social networking sites are structured. They allow users to create a profile of themselves for others to peruse, and to build networks with hundreds or thousands of people who share their interests or just like the look of their page. It's an opportunity to present yourself in a way you want others to see you. Many people reveal everything from their musical tastes and political and sexual orientation to their drinking and drug habits and their inner thoughts and feelings. And it's a very recent phenomenon. "There is no real-world parallel. You don't go walking round the mall telling people whether you are straight or gay," says Fred Stutzman, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies identity and social networks.

What's more, people can end up having multiple identities online. The picture you present of yourself on the dating site Match.com, for instance, will likely be different to the one you give on Facebook, restricted mainly to universities and high schools. This can be confusing if someone is trying to find out more about you by searching on Google - if they're thinking of employing you, for example, or dating you. In recognition of this online identity crisis, Stutzman and his colleague Terrell Russell have set up a service called ClaimID (claimid.com) that allows you to track, verify, annotate and prioritise the information that appears about you online, so that when someone searches you they get representative information.

Such a service could prove increasingly useful for people entering the workforce with a few years of social networking behind them. Tasteless in-jokes are fine within the network, says Stutzman. "But when you're going for that job interview, they can really come back and bite people." A survey by the US National Association of Colleges and Employers published in July found that 27 per cent of employers have Googled their job candidates or checked their profiles on social networking sites. It is not just employers who are interested in your online revelations. US college athletes who posted pictures of themselves behaving badly on their social networking profiles unwittingly found themselves on Bob Reno's badjocks.com site, which publishes stories about scandals in sport.

How does this happen? Offline, it is easy to compartmentalise the different aspects of your life - professional, personal, family - but online, where social networks are so much larger and looser, the distinctions become blurred. These issues have not gone unnoticed by social network providers. They are reluctant to offer too much privacy because this makes it harder for users to communicate with people they don't know. Yet too little privacy means that users lose control over the information they post. "There is a fine balance between protecting and revealing - for users as well as providers," says Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who researches privacy and information security and is looking at the difference between online and offline behaviour.

In everyday life, says Acquisti, we are better equipped to manage our privacy - we are unlikely to give strangers our phone number and date of birth. So why do some people give out this information freely online? According to Acquisti, it's because people expect that the more information they give, the more they gain from the network. His research also shows that some users are not well informed about the reach of the network, and how their profile could potentially be viewed by millions of people. Internet researcher Steve Jones of the University of Illinois at Chicago agrees. "A social network where you create a circle of friends feels private," he says. "It's more of a feeling of a website shared with a small, closed group of people."

For those wishing to keep out prying eyes, most social networks do offer additional privacy tools. Users of MySpace and Facebook can chose to reveal their profiles only to friends, for example. But recent research shows that many users don't make use of these tools, even if they are worried about privacy. A survey of Facebook users published in June by Acquisti and his colleague Ralph Gross found that even among users who were concerned about a stranger knowing their address or class schedule, 22 per cent still gave their address on their Facebook profile, and 40 per cent published their class schedule.

What can be done to prevent what Acquisti and Gross call "an eternal memory of our indiscretions"? Some recommend drastic measures. "Anything you put on the internet has the potential to be made public and you should treat it as such," says Jones. "If you put something on MySpace or Facebook, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out at a family reunion. If the answer is no, then don't put it up." As newspapers report more stories about students being kicked off their courses and bloggers being sacked because of their online revelations, users might well feel compelled to tighten up their online privacy. This semester, students moving into campus accommodation at the University of California, Berkeley, will even be required to attend a class in social networking to make them aware of the risks.

It could go another way, though. As people become more tolerant of online openness, we could see a shift in attitudes and a rethinking of what we consider private. "People tend to adapt to new environments of revelations," says Acquisti. "The new generation may be used to people talking online about their drug use and sex lives."

Their attitudes may depend on what profession they end up in. Lindsey, a law student in Philadelphia who we contacted, has noticed some interesting trends among her friends. "Friends who work as DJs, record-store owners or graphic designers express themselves far more freely than friends who work in more traditional professions," she says. She has also noticed that most of her friends who are teachers don't have online profiles. "They've realised that there's nothing worse than walking in to teach your calculus class only to have them holding copies of the photograph of you on the beach."
 
I enjoyed reading this article today so I thought I'd share. It's a brief look at what would happen to the Earth if humanity were to disappear immediately. Quite humbling really.


Imagine Earth without people

Bob Holmes

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.
“15,589 Number of species threatened with extinction”

Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out. Indeed, there are few better ways to grasp just how utterly we dominate the surface of the Earth than to look at the distribution of artificial illumination (see Graphic). By some estimates, 85 per cent of the night sky above the European Union is light-polluted; in the US it is 62 per cent and in Japan 98.5 per cent. In some countries, including Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, there is no longer any night sky untainted by light pollution.

"Pretty quickly - 24, maybe 48 hours - you'd start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations," says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK's Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.

The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly.

The best illustration of this is the city of Pripyat near Chernobyl in Ukraine, which was abandoned after the nuclear disaster 20 years ago and remains deserted. "From a distance, you would still believe that Pripyat is a living city, but the buildings are slowly decaying," says Ronald Chesser, an environmental biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who has worked extensively in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. "The most pervasive thing you see are plants whose root systems get into the concrete and behind the bricks and into doorframes and so forth, and are rapidly breaking up the structure. You wouldn't think, as you walk around your house every day, that we have a big impact on keeping that from happening, but clearly we do. It's really sobering to see how the plant community invades every nook and cranny of a city."

With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. This has already begun to happen in Pripyat. Wood-framed houses and other smaller structures, which are built to laxer standards, will be the first to go. Next down may be the glassy, soaring structures that tend to win acclaim these days. "The elegant suspension bridges, the lightweight forms, these are the kinds of structures that would be more vulnerable," says Masterton. "There's less reserve of strength built into the design, unlike solid masonry buildings and those using arches and vaults."

But even though buildings will crumble, their ruins - especially those made of stone or concrete - are likely to last thousands of years. "We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old," notes Masterton. "For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It's going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it'll take a long time to become invisible."

The lack of maintenance will have especially dramatic effects at the 430 or so nuclear power plants now operating worldwide. Nuclear waste already consigned to long-term storage in air-cooled metal and concrete casks should be fine, since the containers are designed to survive thousands of years of neglect, by which time their radioactivity - mostly in the form of caesium-137 and strontium-90 - will have dropped a thousandfold, says Rodney Ewing, a geologist at the University of Michigan who specialises in radioactive waste management. Active reactors will not fare so well. As cooling water evaporates or leaks away, reactor cores are likely to catch fire or melt down, releasing large amounts of radiation. The effects of such releases, however, may be less dire than most people suppose.

The area around Chernobyl has revealed just how fast nature can bounce back. "I really expected to see a nuclear desert there," says Chesser. "I was quite surprised. When you enter into the exclusion zone, it's a very thriving ecosystem."

The first few years after people evacuated the zone, rats and house mice flourished, and packs of feral dogs roamed the area despite efforts to exterminate them. But the heyday of these vermin proved to be short-lived, and already the native fauna has begun to take over. Wild boar are 10 to 15 times as common within the Chernobyl exclusion zone as outside it, and big predators are making a spectacular comeback. "I've never seen a wolf in the Ukraine outside the exclusion zone. I've seen many of them inside," says Chesser.

The same should be true for most other ecosystems once people disappear, though recovery rates will vary. Warmer, moister regions, where ecosystem processes tend to run more quickly in any case, will bounce back more quickly than cooler, more arid ones. Not surprisingly, areas still rich in native species will recover faster than more severely altered systems. In the boreal forests of northern Alberta, Canada, for example, human impact mostly consists of access roads, pipelines, andother narrow strips cut through the forest. In the absence of human activity, the forest will close over 80 per cent of these within 50 years, and all but 5 per cent within 200, according to simulations by Brad Stelfox, an independent land-use ecologist based in Bragg Creek, Alberta.

In contrast, places where native forests have been replaced by plantations of a single tree species may take several generations of trees - several centuries - to work their way back to a natural state. The vast expanses of rice, wheat and maize that cover the world's grain belts may also take quite some time to revert to mostly native species.

At the extreme, some ecosystems may never return to the way they were before humans interfered, because they have become locked into a new "stable state" that resists returning to the original. In Hawaii, for example, introduced grasses now generate frequent wildfires that would prevent native forests from re-establishing themselves even if given free rein, says David Wilcove, a conservation biologist at Princeton University.

Feral descendants of domestic animals and plants, too, are likely to become permanent additions in many ecosystems, just as wild horses and feral pigs already have in some places. Highly domesticated species such as cattle, dogs and wheat, the products of centuries of artificial selection and inbreeding, will probably evolve back towards hardier, less specialised forms through random breeding. "If man disappears tomorrow, do you expect to see herds of poodles roaming the plains?" asks Chesser. Almost certainly not - but hardy mongrels will probably do just fine. Even cattle and other livestock, bred for meat or milk rather than hardiness, are likely to persist, though in much fewer numbers than today.

What about genetically modified crops? In August, Jay Reichman and colleagues at the US Environmental Protection Agency's labs in Corvallis, Oregon, reported that a GM version of a perennial called creeping bentgrass had established itself in the wild after escaping from an experimental plot in Oregon. Like most GM crops, however, the bentgrass is engineered to be resistant to a pesticide, which comes at a metabolic cost to the organism, so in the absence of spraying it will be at a disadvantage and will probably die out too.

Nor will our absence mean a reprieve for every species teetering on the brink of extinction. Biologists estimate that habitat loss is pivotal in about 85 per cent of cases where US species become endangered, so most such species will benefit once habitats begin to rebound. However, species in the direst straits may have already passed some critical threshold below which they lack the genetic diversity or the ecological critical mass they need to recover. These "dead species walking" - cheetahs and California condors, for example - are likely to slip away regardless.

Other causes of species becoming endangered may be harder to reverse than habitat loss. For example, about half of all endangered species are in trouble at least partly because of predation or competition from invasive introduced species. Some of these introduced species - house sparrows, for example, which are native to Eurasia but now dominate many cities in North America - will dwindle away once the gardens and bird feeders of suburban civilisation vanish. Others though, such as rabbits in Australia and cheat grass in the American west, do not need human help and will likely be around for the long haul and continue to edge out imperilled native species.

Ironically, a few endangered species - those charismatic enough to have attracted serious help from conservationists - will actually fare worse with people no longer around to protect them. Kirtland's warbler - one of the rarest birds in North America, once down to just a few hundred birds - suffers not only because of habitat loss near its Great Lakes breeding grounds but also thanks to brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the warblers' nests and trick them into raising cowbird chicks instead of their own. Thanks to an aggressive programme to trap cowbirds, warbler numbers have rebounded, but once people disappear, the warblers could be in trouble, says Wilcove.

On the whole, though, a humanless Earth will likely be a safer place for threatened biodiversity. "I would expect the number of species that benefit to significantly exceed the number that suffer, at least globally," Wilcove says.
On the rebound

In the oceans, too, fish populations will gradually recover from drastic overfishing. The last time fishing more or less stopped - during the second world war, when few fishing vessels ventured far from port - cod populations in the North Sea skyrocketed. Today, however, populations of cod and other economically important fish have slumped much further than they did in the 1930s, and recovery may take significantly longer than five or so years.

The problem is that there are now so few cod and other large predatory fish that they can no longer keep populations of smaller fish such as gurnards in check. Instead, the smaller fish turn the tables and outcompete or eat tiny juvenile cod, thus keeping their erstwhile predators in check. The problem will only get worse in the first few years after fishing ceases, as populations of smaller, faster-breeding fish flourish like weeds in an abandoned field. Eventually, though, in the absence of fishing, enough large predators will reach maturity to restore the normal balance. Such a transition might take anywhere from a few years to a few decades, says Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

With trawlers no longer churning up nutrients from the ocean floor, near-shore ecosystems will return to a relatively nutrient-poor state. This will be most apparent as a drop in the frequency of harmful algal blooms such as the red tides that often plague coastal areas today. Meanwhile, the tall, graceful corals and other bottom-dwelling organisms on deep-water reefs will gradually begin to regrow, restoring complex three-dimensional structure to ocean-floor habitats that are now largely flattened, featureless wastelands.

Long before any of this, however - in fact, the instant humans vanish from the Earth - pollutants will cease spewing from automobile tailpipes and the smokestacks and waste outlets of our factories. What happens next will depend on the chemistry of each particular pollutant. A few, such as oxides of nitrogen and sulphur and ozone (the ground-level pollutant, not the protective layer high in the stratosphere), will wash out of the atmosphere in a matter of a few weeks. Others, such as chlorofluorocarbons, dioxins and the pesticide DDT, take longer to break down. Some will last a few decades.

The excess nitrates and phosphates that can turn lakes and rivers into algae-choked soups will also clear away within a few decades, at least for surface waters. A little excess nitrate may persist for much longer within groundwater, where it is less subject to microbial conversion into atmospheric nitrogen. "Groundwater is the long-term memory in the system," says Kenneth Potter, a hydrologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Carbon dioxide, the biggest worry in today's world because of its leading role in global warming, will have a more complex fate. Most of the CO2 emitted from burning fossil fuels is eventually absorbed into the ocean. This happens relatively quickly for surface waters - just a few decades - but the ocean depths will take about a thousand years to soak up their full share. Even when that equilibrium has been reached, though, about 15 per cent of the CO2 from burning fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere, leaving its concentration at about 300 parts per million compared with pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. "There will be CO2 left in the atmosphere, continuing to influence the climate, more than 1000 years after humans stop emitting it," says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually calcium ions released from sea-bottom sediments will allow the sea to mop up the remaining excess over the next 20, 000 years or so.

Even if CO2 emissions stop tomorrow, though, global warming will continue for another century, boosting average temperatures by a further few tenths of a degree. Atmospheric scientists call this "committed warming", and it happens because the oceans take so long to warm up compared with the atmosphere. In essence, the oceans are acting as a giant air conditioner, keeping the atmosphere cooler than it would otherwise be for the present level of CO2. Most policy-makers fail to take this committed warming into account, says Gerald Meehl, a climate modeller at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder. "They think if it gets bad enough we'll just put the brakes on, but we can't just stop and expect everything to be OK, because we're already committed to this warming."

That extra warming we have already ordered lends some uncertainty to the fate of another important greenhouse gas, methane, which produces about 20 per cent of our current global warming. Methane's chemical lifetime in the atmosphere is only about 10 years, so its concentration could rapidly return to pre-industrial levels if emissions cease. The wild card, though, is that there are massive reserves of methane in the form of methane hydrates on the sea floor and frozen into permafrost. Further temperature rises may destabilise these reserves and dump much of the methane into the atmosphere. "We may stop emitting methane ourselves, but we may already have triggered climate change to the point where methane may be released through other processes that we have no control over," says Pieter Tans, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA in Boulder.

No one knows how close the Earth is to that threshold. "We don't notice it yet in our global measurement network, but there is local evidence that there is some destabilisation going on of permafrost soils, and methane is being released," says Tans. Solomon, on the other hand, sees little evidence that a sharp global threshold is near.

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

And if the visitors chanced across one of today's landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic - and maybe even paper - to bear witness to our presence. "I would virtually guarantee that there would be some," says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. "The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time."

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

25731101.jpg


From issue 2573 of New Scientist magazine, 12 October 2006, page 36-41
 
^ Thats another "Humans suck" thing isnt it?

I think the earth should stop being a whiney bitch and deal with it
 
Also a pretty comprehensive article on Near Death Experiences, and the latest scientific reasonings and evidence about them (a topic touched on the first page of this thread) Anyone who has ever suffered from Sleep Paralysis will probably find it pretty interesting.


Light at the end of the tunnel

14 October 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Douglas Fox



JOE no longer fears death. In fact the last time it happened he rather enjoyed the ride. First he was plunged into darkness, then came a bright light, a field of flowers, and a man in white who told him about his future. Later doctors informed him that his pulse had been flat for 44 seconds.

For Joe his near-death experience (NDE) was a very real preview of what is in store for him after death. Science has a different take: NDEs are real, but they have nothing to do with the afterlife. Instead, they are illusions created by a fading brain. But despite numerous attempts, no one has been able to scientifically explain all the elements of an NDE.

Now one researcher thinks he can. For Kevin Nelson, a neurophysiologist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, NDEs may be little more than dream-like states brought on by stress and a predisposition to a common kind of sleep disorder. If he's right, as many as 40 per cent of us could be primed to see the light.

Written accounts of NDEs go back more than two thousand years and have been reported all over the world. Most include a "point of no return" that if crossed will lead to death, and a person who turns you away from it. The identity of the person seems to depend on your religion. Christians, for example, often meet Jesus or a dead relative while Hindus may see Yamraj, god of the dead.

For Nelson, this suggests that NDEs stem from something fundamentally human. "People say that because there's a common thread running through them all there must be a spiritual element," he says. "I look at that common thread and I see a biological process."

Whatever causes NDEs, the experience is surprisingly common. Nearly 20 per cent of heart attack survivors recall at least some elements of an NDE, which can include out-of-body sensations, euphoria, tunnels or a bright light. Half of these people experience full-on NDEs that include several such phenomena. Although they are fairly common, near-death experiences have never been adequately explained. Most rational suggestions trace them back to falling levels of oxygen in the brain, and several explanations have been offered for how this hypoxia might trigger vivid experiences.

Some scientists say that they might be triggered by a hypothetical molecule called "endopsychosin" that binds to neurons and protects them from hypoxia. Others suspect that a flood of endorphins in the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with emotion, could lead to euphoria and feelings of detachment. Falling oxygen levels might also cause epilepsy-like electrical discharges in the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, leading to a rerun of life events. Activity in the amygdala might lend these visions a spiritual tint. Other observers have pointed to painkillers or anaesthetics as possible causes.

In fact, the list of explanations goes on and on. But many of them fail to account for the whole experience and are impossible to test scientifically. Many also overlook the fact that you don't have to be at death's door to have an NDE. A study in 1990 at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center in Charlottesville of 58 people who had experienced NDEs found that half would have survived without medical care. Sometimes fainting can be enough to trigger NDE-like sensations.

Nelson says that that's because despite the name, NDE has little to do with actually being close to death. He argues that the experience stems from an acute bout of "REM intrusion" - a glitch in the brain's circuitry that, in times of extreme stress, may flip it into a mixed state of awareness where it is both in REM sleep and partially awake at the same time. "The concept that our brain is either 100 per cent awake or 100 per cent in REM sleep is absolutely erroneous," says Mark Mahowald, a neurologist at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis. "We can have pieces of one state intruding into another, and that's when things get interesting."

REM intrusion is a common feature of narcolepsy - a neurological disorder characterised by uncontrollable bouts of sleep that can cause elaborate hallucinations and, sometimes, out-of-body experiences. But REM intrusion can affect anyone, and frequently does. Recent estimates suggest that up to 40 per cent of people have experienced "sleep paralysis", a form of REM intrusion in which you awaken with part of your brain still in REM sleep and your body paralysed. Often the result is a terrifying feeling of being unable to move, accompanied by visual or auditory hallucinations and pressure on the chest. Sleep paralysis has been offered as a rational explanation for many apparently supernatural phenomena, including witch attacks, visitations by the dead, and more recently alien abductions.

Could REM intrusion also explain NDE? "Elements of near-death experience bear uncanny similarity to the REM state," says Nelson. Falling and floating - common in dreams - also occur in NDEs. And although normal dreams fade quickly from memory, that quirky combination of dreaming and wakefulness causes people with narcolepsy to recall their hallucinations vividly. They may remember their NDEs in such clear detail for the same reason, says Nelson. Meanwhile, total paralysis - a hallmark of REM - might make a person believe they really are dead.

REM intrusion could underlie other aspects of NDE, too. "Narcoleptics, whose REM systems often become active while awake, are known to have a propensity for out-of-body experiences," says Nelson, and the frequency of these experiences decreases when their narcolepsy is treated with drugs.

Watching from the ceiling as surgeons work on one's body can be especially convincing during an NDE. Olaf Blanke, a cognitive neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, says these sensations happen when the brain fails to weave different threads of sensory information together. If tactile senses tell the body it is lying down, but a wobbly inner ear causes vision to be interpreted as though from a floating perspective, then a person may well "see" themselves from the ceiling. Blanke has caused people to see their disembodied legs from a floating perspective by electrically stimulating the angular gyrus, a brain area that integrates sensory information. A mixed REM state could disrupt the integration of sensory information in much the same way, says Blanke. The brain may be aware, but the transfer of sensory and motor information from the body is largely shut down.

To investigate the possible link between REM and near-death experiences, Nelson surveyed the frequency of REM intrusion among 55 people who had NDEs in a variety of circumstances, including fainting, heart attack, traffic accident, lightning strike and during surgery. He compared them with 55 healthy volunteers who were matched for age and gender. The results were striking. Around 60 per cent of the NDE group reported having experienced symptoms of REM intrusion, either before or after their NDE, compared with just 24 per cent of the control group. What's more, REM intrusions in the NDE group were more elaborate, including not just sleep paralysis but also hallucinations (Neurology, vol 66, p 1003). "This is good preliminary evidence," says Nelson.

One fly in the ointment is that REM intrusion is usually a frightening experience, which is hard to reconcile with the often comforting feelings of NDE. In response, Nelson points out that in the context of NDE, REM intrusion happens in a crisis, when our fight-or-flight response has already dampened our normal fear. It's something we can all relate to, feeling strangely detached as a car pile-up unfolds in slow motion, or calmly administering first aid at an accident scene only to panic later. We're naturally prepared, he says, to find the visions comforting.

Not everyone is calm in a crisis, of course, and it is also true that not all NDEs are as comforting as Joe's. Some survivors report hellish encounters that leave them depressed for months afterwards. One woman drifted beyond the stars to an endless void where voices taunted her about the dark eternity to come. A man was tormented by demons who "chattered like blackbirds" about his dangling body after he had hanged himself.

As for the feelings of cosmic unity that accompany the more pleasant NDEs, Nelson points out that the brain's limbic system, which includes the amygdala, lights up during REM sleep. The limbic system is responsible for emotion and some aspects of memory, and studies have long implicated it as a lightning rod - some would say God's rod - for religious experience. Electrical stimulation induces transcendental feelings, and patients with epilepsy whose seizures originate in this part of the brain report experiencing deep spiritual revelations.

Nelson's ideas have been well received by some. "Many of us have thought that REM intrusion was a plausible explanation," says Mahowald, who has spent decades treating narcoleptic patients. "It doesn't take much to extrapolate what we've heard over the last 30 years to near-death experiences."
Emergency trigger

So if REM intrusion could explain NDE, what explains the REM intrusion? Nelson speculates that the brainstem - which regulates heartbeat, breathing and the sleep-wake cycle - could also be the source of NDEs. In many physiological emergencies such as heart attack, fainting or near drowning, blood pressure or blood oxygen levels quickly drop, or levels of carbon dioxide in the blood quickly rise. This stimulates the vagus nerve, which connects the heart and lungs to the brainstem. According to Nelson, this could cause the REM centres in the brainstem to snap on without warning.

There is some evidence to support the connection. Stimulating the vagus nerve in cats pushes them into REM sleep within 45 seconds. And epilepsy patients whose condition is treated with implants that stimulate their vagus nerve also slip more quickly into REM during daytime naps.

If a few zaps from the vagus can tickle REM centres into action, then this could explain why fighter pilots who black out because of low blood pressure in the brain during high-g accelerations often experience visions of beautiful places, euphoria, out-of-body sensations and weightlessness.

The vagal connection gains further support from a study published in 1994 by Thomas Lempert, then at the Rudolph Virchow Clinic in Berlin, Germany, in which volunteers made themselves faint through a combination of hyperventilating, standing and breath-holding. Many of them experienced euphoric NDE-like sensations such as floating out of their body, entering another world, or encountering supernatural beings. Nelson believes this is a powerful example of how even benign cardiovascular changes might induce REM intrusion and subsequent NDE - even if death is unlikely.

Hypotension could also directly evoke out-of-body sensations. The brain's temporal-parietal junction, which is known to cause such sensations when it malfunctions, is located at the far end of a tree of blood vessels. "So if blood pressure drops," says Blanke, "perfusion in this area is first to go. That could be one reason, purely anatomically, why out-of-body experience is related to NDE."

REM intrusion could even explain the biggest mystery of NDEs: that they seem to occur at a time when the brain is hypoxic and brainwaves recorded from the scalp are flat. "That is definitely paradoxical," says Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who has studied NDE for 30 years. "I don't see any way around this paradox except to say that either our observations of NDEs are mistaken or our models of brain and mind are inadequate."

REM intrusion could solve the problem. The REM centres reside in the brainstem, and while the higher brain areas in the cortex quickly blank out during hypoxia, the more primitive brainstem remains active for several minutes. Whether in fact the brainstem alone could account for NDE without help from the cortex, which normally handles vision and hearing, is anyone's guess, but there is another possibility: an NDE that seems to last many minutes might occur in the few seconds right before or right after the cortex blanks out. "It is likely that NDEs do not appear in real time," says Mahowald, "they may actually be brief, but perceived as prolonged." REM dreaming, which is notorious for compressing time, could be the culprit.

Not everyone is convinced. Greyson maintains that the protocol for Nelson's survey - recruiting NDE subjects on the internet - could have artificially elevated the frequency of REM intrusion in that group. "Those who report their NDEs on the internet may be more likely to admit to unusual things happening to them," he says.

Greyson also questions the conclusion that more REM intrusion in people who have had an NDE means that the phenomenon causes NDE. "It may be more plausible," he says, "that NDEs played a role in subsequent REM intrusion." It is known, for example, that people with post-traumatic stress disorder subsequently have more frequent REM intrusion - maybe because they sleep less soundly. But "if NDE enhances subsequent REM intrusion," responds Nelson, "then that would tell me that NDE and REM are related." He believes this is a testable hypothesis and encourages other researchers to investigate.

He is already planning further tests of his own. He wants to monitor REM activity in the brains of people he expects to experience NDE-like symptoms under certain conditions and record any reports of tunnels, lights and so on. For the moment, though, he won't reveal exactly how he plans to go about this.

The definitive scientific explanation for NDEs may be a little way off, but if, as Nelson's work suggests, many of us are in line for a talk with the man in white, perhaps we should make use of the time we have left to come up with some really good questions.

From issue 2573 of New Scientist magazine, 14 October 2006, page 48-50
 
m4dd0g said:
^ Thats another "Humans suck" thing isnt it?

I think the earth should stop being a whiney bitch and deal with it

Well if you've got enough time to be screwing around on bluelight for half the day then you've probably got enough time to read it and come up with your own opinion. So I'll let you get on with that :)
 
m4dd0g said:
^ Thats another "Humans suck" thing isnt it?

I think the earth should stop being a whiney bitch and deal with it

Yeah but saying that is totally wrong because we are products of the Earth therefore we ARE the Earth. Viewing them as separate entities is the cause of our problems right there. We are the only species on Earth with the knowledge to protect and destroy this planet. Through greed and financial and economical mis-management we have decided to go down the path of destruction. Human's dont suck. It's our leaders and authority figures that suck for taking us down a certain path, duping us into believing they are doing it all for our good. Our climate and environment is changing. As our population grows and the fight for resources gets harder and harder, our current way of life and way we look at things as a species WILL have to give. In order to prevent the extinction of the human race sometime in the distant future, we will have to put the needs of the many in front of the needs of the individual. For example, when the sea level rises in the Bay of Bengal and tens of millions of people living at sea level are threatened by rising waters, who is going to take them all and how will we deal with such a catastrophe? Things like the Asian tsunami and Katrina are just the tip of the ice burg as the repercussions of our ecological mis-management become more apparent. I've realised that change will only be brought about by lobbying authority figures in different areas of society and spreading the word. I spend a least 3-5 hours a week writing letters to politicians and giving my opinion in order to change the minds of the few who hold sway in this increasingly volatile situation we have caused.
 
^ My comment was Snipier (if that's not a real word I'm copyrighting it) :)

But it's not so much a political whiney article as it is an interesting thought experiment...

Like Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth's What-If Machine.

Wha...? I made myself sad.
 
endlesseulogy said:
Yeah but saying that is totally wrong because we are products of the Earth therefore we ARE the Earth.

worst reasoning ever.

endlesseulogy said:
I spend a least 3-5 hours a week writing letters to politicians and giving my opinion in order to change the minds of the few who hold sway in this increasingly volatile situation we have caused.

you can't even convince bluelighters
good luck there
 
^ My comment was funnier!

Agreed

worst reasoning ever.

Well not really. More words does not nessesarily mean better reasoning.
Simple ways of explaining certain concepts can be thought-provoking.

you can't even convince bluelighters
good luck there

Hmmmm. There are alot of Bluelighters that don't post. Remember that. ;)
 
Shelf-Taught

I count twelve degree's(hine on, learners) derre...

+1 if I stop drinkin'.
 
Boooooooo.....

Damnn, 'tis a route'hate'in' adver'to'eyes'meant.
:p
 
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