The paper, published in the British journal Nature, describes the case of a 22-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric problems who was being evaluated for treatment of epilepsy. When a region of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction was electrically stimulated, the woman described encounters with a ‘shadow person’ who mimicked her bodily [...]

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RU: So a while back, MAPS got approval for a study in MDMA (ecstasy) assisted psychotherapy. Where are we at with that?
JAG: It’s almost over. They’ve treated 15 out of 20 patients. It’s very slow. There are lots of pre-conditions for the study because it’s such a controversial substance. But the results are [...]

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A New York gallery has angered a US Catholic group with its decision to exhibit a milk chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ. The six-foot (1.8m) sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord,” depicts Jesus Christ naked on the cross.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue called it “one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever.”
And [...]

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(an excerpt from a pleasurable rant on Goblin Market)
The word singularity is a lie, both in SF and in life. There is no one singularity. You keep pushing through them, and it’s fucking terrifying, and fucking amazing. You wake up and one day the USSR is gone and the tech boom crashed and you’re divorced [...]

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Taiwan is to close one lane of a major highway to protect more than a million butterflies, which cross the road on their seasonal migration. The purple milkweed butterfly, which winters in the south of the island, passes over some 600m of motorway to reach its breeding ground in the north. Many of [...]

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Hopkins, for me at lest, is one of those poets whose music is so beautiful that it doesn’t really matter whether you share his beliefs or not. Anyway, he loved the world more than the abstractions of dogma — his poetry is a dead giveaway.
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of [...]

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Or, further evidence that the universe is laughing at us . . .
The Japanese space telescope, Hinode, has sent back startling images of the Sun’s outer limb. Where astronomers expected to see a calm region called the chromosphere, they saw a seething mass of swaying spikes.

“These structures are 8000 kilometres long and some extend [...]

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